I don't see any apparent negative impact of enabling the sound device, so I agree it should be added by default.
Also, I am completely blown away by the performance of sound playback. I'm writing this in Safari, mail.app is running, along with a few other osx apps doing various things. WinXp is running in the VM, with winamp playing an internet stream perfectly. Perfectly!. I'm running "Load in Dock" to watch cpu load, and both cores are right down at the bottome of the graph, around %10 each.
This is on a dual core Mac Mini with 2gig of ram.
Again, I am completely amazed at how seemless the audio is from the windows session. I've run streaming video within the VM as well, without a hitch, not a single drop out, and cpu utilization that was half of what the mac windows media player needed running under rosetta.
Even in this early beta, parallels is now a solid usable program. Once USB and Firewire are working, it will be nearly perfect from my point of view. Best $39 I've spent in a long while.
Oh yeah, Parallels Dev team, listen to this idea. I know full screen is coming eventually, and I look forward to it. How about a bit of eye candy, just to make it mac-stylish? An easy way to switch from the full screen VM to the full screen OSX that uses a similar transition to fast user switching? Technical details aside, just think of how impressive it would be for a potential switcher when you hit a key combination and the windows screen rotates out while the osx screen rotates in. Tap the keys, and roll back over to the still running windows.
Wouldn't that just be the coolest? (grin)
Kevin L.