I tied out the MacLook mode, and I thought it was okay, but I eventually decided to use it since Parallels 5 is annoyingly slow in coherence mode, and I wanted to use full-screen mode without window decorations introducing extra overhead. So I switched off MacLook, and most things returned to normal. But not everything. Windows Explorer windows are still differently colored, and lots of my icons are still MacLook style. How do I FULLY revert MacLook? Thanks.
Opening the 'Personalize' preferences in W7 and selecting one of the Aero themes should do it. Quickest way of finding the option is to right-click on a blank area of the W7 desktop - it's the last menu item.
Actually, using Windows XP Thanks for the reply. But actually, I'm using Windows XP. I tried selecting a theme in XP, but it didn't do anything about the icons in Windows Explorer. Any other ideas? I think this is a bug in MacLook. When you disable it, they don't fully revert it. How can I report this? Do Parallels actually pay attention to the bug reports filed when you "Report a Problem..."? BTW, in case you're wondering, I'm using Windows XP because I use chip design tools (Xilinx, Actel, Lattice), and none of them support 64-bit or anything newer than WinXP. So I'm stuck with that. Interestingly, through Parallels, I can do everything including using the USB drivers to program chips. Pretty cool.
Have you tried TweakUI from Microsoft? That has an icon rebuild tool. It sounds like your icon cache isn't rebuilding properly - there are a number of possible solutions, from the simple delete & restore your iconcache.db to registry tweaks to increase memory: rather than repeat them all here, I suggest you google 'rebuild icon cache xp' and go through what comes up to see if it fits your case. Good luck!