Hi everyone. I've got an issue which is extremely repeatable, but I'm not 100% certain what is causing it. I *believe* it is something to do with installing .Net inside of a virtual machine, but I'm not completely certain. It's manifested as breaking a number of games which I had been trying to run inside of Parallels 6, preventing them from running at all. I have used Parallels 5 in the past, creating a brand new XP 32-bit virtual machine from scratch (IE, just putting the disc in and installing it brand new) and have never encountered this issue. It has affected me, however, in VMs for both XP 32-bit and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit, either as a virtual machine or as a virtual machine created from a Boot Camp partition. So here's a quick overview. I originally created a Boot Camp partition and installed 64-bit Win 7 on it. After installing the partition, I rebooted back into OS X, set it up as a Parallels 6 virtual machine, and began installing/updating/setting up Windows through that. After I'd run Windows Update and had everything up to date, I started installing games -- the sole reason I got Parallels was for gaming, so that's all I wanted on the Windows partition. I first noticed that there was an issue when I went to launch Global Agenda. The launcher crashed immediately, giving me an error I'd never seen before starting with System.Unauthorized.AccessException, complaining that access to a configuration file located at User\AppData\Hi-Rez Studios\SteamGlobalAgendaLauncher.config had been denied. Here is a screenshot of the error under XP, but it was identical to the one I had in Win 7: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1749333/global-agenda-crash.jpg Googling around the few hits I found suggested a problem with .Net, but installing it and reinstalling it never dealt with the problem. Keeping in mind this was under the Boot Camp partition, I rebooted into Windows and tried to launch the game natively, only receiving the same error as before. I got varying strange behaviour from a number of other games -- Fallout 3 would load, showing the game launcher, then as soon as I pressed play the launcher would reappear as if I'd just run the game. Every time I pressed play the same thing would happen. Battleforge's patcher would download to a certain point, start patching, then fail with an error. In both cases I googled and the only culprit seemed to be a problem with .Net that was fixed on reinstall. However, uninstalling/reinstalling .Net never fixed the problem for me. Frustrated, I wiped the Boot Camp partition and started over with a straight 32-bit Win 7 virtual machine. I installed Windows into it, patched everything until it was up to date, then tried again. Without fail, I got the same exact issue in every single game. For attempt #3, I did a 32-bit XP virtual machine (just to isolate the problem as not being down to Win 7 incompatibilities), ran Windows Update, and got the same problem as before. My final effort was to do a 32-bit XP virtual machine but NOT run Windows Update (instead leaving everything completely unpatched and fresh), instead just allowing the games themselves to run the .Net installers, but once again I got the same problem as every other time. Following all of this, the last thing I tried was to create a Boot Camp partition, reboot off of the Win 7 64-bit CD, install the operating system natively, run Windows Update natively (IE, not creating a VM whatsoever at this point) and then install/launch the game. I got no problems this way and was able to load the game without any trouble. I rebooted into OSX, created a VM from the partition, and lo and behold --- the same games which failed to run before now loaded without any trouble inside the VM. So, clearly there seems to be some trouble with Parallels 6. I'm not completely certain that it's .Net specifically, but the internet suggested that the problems I was having were .Net related. Installing Windows on its own partition and only creating a VM after the system was completely patched and up to date solved the problem, but obviously this is seriously unrealistic to do on a regular basis. I don't recall having this problem under Parallels 5 and had run a number of games under it in the past (although not these specific titles), so I can't say for 100% sure. At the moment I'm creating a fresh Parallels 5 32-bit XP virtual machine, will attempt to run the games again, and if they load fine I will back up the VM and upgrade to 6 again and see if the VM survives that upgrade without trouble. If it does, I can clearly state that the problem is around 6, even if I'm not completely certain of what the problem is. Is anyone at Parallels aware of this issue or has anyone else been affected by it? As soon as I test the Parallels 5 VM, I will post the results. Thanks.
My attempt under Parallels 5 threw up the same error. I'm certain that I had it working before, over six months ago, and had about a hundred gigs worth of games installed inside a VM without any problems whatsoever. I reinstalled Parallels 5 using the latest version that I'd just downloaded, which hadn't been upgraded prior to me purchasing 6; I don't know if the issue was caused by something added in a subsequent update to 5 or was something left over from 6 even though I uninstalled everything, but the problem still happened. As I'm using an Air now (the prior tests were done on a 15" i7 MacBook Pro that I no longer have) I was unable to install XP onto a Boot Camp partition, since Apple only supports 7 on them. Installing 32-bit Win 7 on it worked fine, provided that I did all updates on the native partition and not inside of Parallels. I updated the system fully, installed Steam, installed Global Agenda, the game launched without any trouble. Clearly there is something going wrong here when Parallels gets ahold of the system. I don't know where it's going wrong, but it's extremely concerning from a stability perspective. I was able to import my Win 7 Boot Camp partition into a Parallels VM (converting it from a partition to a straight VM), but as I had only given the partition about 25 gigs of space just to test things, I was unable to resize the partition inside the VM using Parallel's tools, so the drive was stuck at 25 gigs and I couldn't install anything else. Needing to create a partition, install and update the system natively, and only then using Parallels to make a VM is annoying enough, but not being able to do anything with the VM's hard drive afterward -- resizing, compacting, etc -- makes it completely pointless. When it comes to performance for games, Parallels is consistently almost as close to booting Windows natively as the experience gets. But it would seriously be nice if you could adopt a significant percentage of VMWare's stability in the process.
In case anyone is still interested in the saga of my weekend, I got it to work: By using VMware Fusion 3.1 to install and update the system, then using Parallels Transporter to copy that VM into a Parallels one. Now everything works fine and I didn't need to set up a Boot Camp partition. However, I don't think I need to express the irony in needing to use a competitor's product to get this working 100%. It would be nice for someone at Parallels to weigh in on this and at minimum acknowledge the issue if not explain how it's being fixed. Considering how pervasive .Net is in almost all Windows applications, much less games, problems with it are just unacceptable.
The problems you describe are the closest to the issues we've been having I've come across. The applications are a bit different, but the culprits are the same. We are running Windows 7 on a 3.06 GHz iMac in a virtual machine through Parallels 6 in order to use MadCap Flare version 6. My colleague reported that the XML preview function wasn't working properly. It relies on Microsoft .NET, which was somehow "broken" by Parallels. The virtual machine is created through BootCamp first. We then install Parallels on the MacOS X side (10.6.4-5 Leopard) and have it access the BootCamp partition. This gives my colleague the flexibility of a dual OS environment while also giving her the option of booting exclusively into Win7 if she does some graphics-heavy work requiring all computing resources go to Windows. After 3-4 installs, the pattern seems to be the same... - Get things up and running in BootCamp (install OS, apps, updates with Windows 7 in full control of the computer) and everything is working fine - Not long after rebooting into MacOS X and accessing the BootCamp partition as a virtual machine, anything that ties into .Net doesn't work properly. In Flare, in the place of an expected preview we get: The XML page cannot be displayed. Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button or try again later. Declaration has an invalid name. Error processing resource. 'file:///C:/Program Files (x86)/Madcap Software/MadCap Flare V6.... <!doctype HTML public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN"> I can't say when and why it "breaks." After 3-4 installs from scratch (completely wiping the BootCamp partition and reinstalling Parallels), it happens again. I suspect things MAY be going bad when Windows updates are installed while running in the BootCamp partition from Parallels, but I'm not certain. The "fix" has been to keep this system running exclusively in BootCamp (booted in MacOS X or Windows 7; not virtual machine involved). Through BootCamp alone, MadCap Flare and the .NET Frameworks work without problem. Unfortunately, it means that Parallels is not being used at all -- it's functionality is being wasted. Unfortunately, I can't afford to have things "flake out" again because we have important projects that can't be held up. Too bad for my colleague: she now has to resort to rebooting every time she needs to switch between Mac and Windows 7 apps. Parallels was supposed to solve this annoyance. Here's the kicker: We have an almost identical configuration of this system that IS currently running Flare in Windows 7 via Parallels/BootCamp partition and it works fine?! No idea why, but to be safe and sure, I've disabled Windows 7's automatic updates, making sure to ONLY install them while booted into Windows 7 exclusively via BootCamp. I am baffled.
