I just upgraded 3 machines to build 5160. One machine is a Mac Pro with 16 GB RAM, the second is a MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM), and the third is a brand new iMac (2.8 GHz and 4 GB RAM). All three machines exhibit the very same problem, so I'm reasonably confident that it is a Parallels problem, not anything peculiar about my machines. I did these upgrades today and the experience was the same. On the MP, the Windows shutdown process lasted 15 minutes. On the iMac it is still going after 20 minutes. On the MacBook Pro, it took 22 minutes to complete the shutdown. After the initial install, the shutdown times speed up, but are unbelievably slow for machines as fast and as memory rich as mine are. I'm still waiting on the iMac, but I've had a chance to reboot and shutdown the two other machines. Both took around 5 minutes to shutdown. What I discovered is if I shutdown Parallels before the Windows shutdown process completes itself, Parallels puts the machines in "suspended mode". By resuming from "suspended", the shutdown completes nearly instantaneously. Any others experience these problems and, if so, have you figured out the cause and/or a solution? Thanks.
What version of OSX do you have on all three machines? How much RAM do you have allocated to each Guest OS on each Mac? Are you using expanding size or fixed size HDDs? Are you joining a DOMAIN with the Guest OS on each? If so, what are your DNS settings pointing to? You can quickly try to turn on VT-x for the VMs. It might help.
I'm running 10.4.10 on all three machines. Each VM has 768 MB RAM allocated to the VMs. I haven't tried turning off Vt-x - never needed anything before. I've been running Parallels since the pre-release of version 1.0, although not on these particular machines. The Mac Pro is about a year old; the other machines are replacements for earlier versions of the same Intel model. I go through many machines in my programming work. I'm also using expanding size HD's for each of the three VMs.
Additional information. The iMac 2.8 is still trying to shut down, some 4 hours later. The only effective way to do this is to use the stop sign (shut down Parallels) button in Parallels tools. It kills the VM. I figure that after 4 hours, there isn't anything going on. Parallels has gotten totally confused at this point. BTW, disabling Vt-X doesn't do anything useful on the other machines; they still shut down slowly.
Well, after some experimentation, I've discovered A solution to the long shutdown problem. Reasoning that I had plenty of memory available in all the machines, I bumped up the memory assigned to the VM to over 1 GB. Astonishingly, the shut down time dropped to about 30 seconds - about the same on my Windows boxes. Just to be sure this is the solution, I changed the memory allocated back to 768 MB and as sure as rain falls in Seattle and Portland, the shutdown problems began again with the iMac leading the pack at more than 2 hours with no shutdown. So, apparently, the new release of Parallels has a larger memory footprint than earlier versions. It may be the case that it doesn't actually require more memory but when faced with machines that have maxed out memory profiles, it assumes more memory assigned to Parallels VM. In any case, it is no skin off my nose to give Parallels 1 GB or more if it speeds up shutdowns. I can't afford to have multihour shutdowns of Windoze -- I mean, it gives all new meaning to WinDOZE.
