What Happens With An Accidental "Command-Q"?

Yesterday, briefly forgetting I was running an app in my VM, I hit Command-Q to close the app, as if I was closing a Mac app. Instead, the result was I closed Parallels while my VM and various Win apps were running.

Question: is shutting Parallels down while a VM is running equivalent to an improper shutdown of the guest OS? Or is it more benign, like hibernation or sleep or something? When I re-launched Parallels and then the VM, I got no messages suggeesting an improper shutdown...

 

That is strange... Are you sure that you had things running? I always get a warning prior to quitting... Perhaps the warning box got turned off somehow in some Preference menu? I don't know of that option though...

 

I am 100% sure I had the following Windows apps running when I hit Command-Q:
- The Win XP VM itself
- MS Word for Windows 2003
- Minitab 15 (minimized)
- Solitaire (minimized)

There was no warning; Command-Q led immediately to the Parallels App and all the open apps within it simply closing.

One other thing I forgot to mention - the Parallels dock icon had this "draining hourglass" imagery superimposed on it after the actual parallels screen closed

 

VM Suspended

What it did was to save the state of your VM and then quit (the hourglass was indicating that was occurring). So from your original post, yes, it's more equivalent to hibernating your VM. When you launch Parallels again, before starting your VM, does it say "Suspended" as the state of the VM (in the VM window, just below WindowsXP or your guest type)? Also, when you restart the VM from a suspended state, the apps that were open *should* be open again after the VM resumes.

PS - this behavior as well as the behavior of the Stop and Pause buttons is controlled from the Parallels Preferences pane, under "General."

 

Actually, when I re-launch Parallels, it starts "from scratch", as if the VM had previously been completely shut down. None of the previously open apps were open when I restarted the VM.

 

Did you check your logs to see if it was a graceful shutdown? I know where to find them on OS X... I google when I need the stuff on Windows...