Upton O'Good
Member
At first this used to happen once in a while. Now it happens almost every time I start Parallels.
I start the program, by either clicking the dock icon or double-clicking the desktop icon, and the icon starts bouncing. Then the icon slows waaaaay down, and every open application, including the Finder, starts responding very slowly to inputs. The cursor still moves at the normal speed, but between the time you click a menu and the time it finally drops can take several minutes, assuming the click even registers. Sometimes you wait several minutes and nothing happens, so you have to try again--and wait again.
Meanwhile, the icon has stopped bouncing, but if you open the "Force Quit Applications" tool, by typing Command-Option-Escape, which also takes several minutes to open, it shows that Parallels is still trying to run, but it is "not responding." Various other programs go from "running" to "not responding" if you sit there and watch it for a while.
Sometimes Parallels actually starts up, but I usually assume if it hasn't done so after half an hour, it isn't going to, and the way it sets the cooling fan to howling suggests it might not be good for my hardware to wait any longer. But on those occasions where it does complete its startup, incredibly, it actually runs and works normally.
If you're patient enough, you can eventually force-quit Parallels, but the process takes about a half hour from the time you decide to kill it until you actually have a useful computer again. I usually don't have that long, so I need to shut the machine down by holding the power button down, knowing that I had some unsaved changes in several open apps when I stupidly tried to launch Parallels.
The only way I can be sure this won't happen is to
1. Uninstall Parallels using the uninstall application on the install disk image,
2. Delete com.parallels.Parallels.plist from ~/Library/Preferences,
3. Run "Repair Permissions" from Disk Utility,
4. Reboot the computer,
5. Install Parallels,
6. Launch Parallels before launching any other programs, and if you anticipate using more than one VM, open them all now because opening them later causes another instance of Parallels to start up and the same issue can occur,
7. Cross fingers.
That's a lot of work to launch an application. I'm not using coherence or doing anything fancy. I used to try to change the keyboard settings, but that doesn't work right anyway, and I've had to trash my preferences so many times I've just gotten used to working with the default settings.
At one point I thought that changing some preference might be corrupting the preferences file, but this is not the case. Whatever gets corrupted does so without any help from me.
If there is another application that Parallels is conflicting with, I have no idea what that might be. I'm not using anything unusual or anything I don't need for my work.
I'm using the latest build (5608) in 10.5.4.
Is anybody else experiencing this, or am I alone being tortured?
I start the program, by either clicking the dock icon or double-clicking the desktop icon, and the icon starts bouncing. Then the icon slows waaaaay down, and every open application, including the Finder, starts responding very slowly to inputs. The cursor still moves at the normal speed, but between the time you click a menu and the time it finally drops can take several minutes, assuming the click even registers. Sometimes you wait several minutes and nothing happens, so you have to try again--and wait again.
Meanwhile, the icon has stopped bouncing, but if you open the "Force Quit Applications" tool, by typing Command-Option-Escape, which also takes several minutes to open, it shows that Parallels is still trying to run, but it is "not responding." Various other programs go from "running" to "not responding" if you sit there and watch it for a while.
Sometimes Parallels actually starts up, but I usually assume if it hasn't done so after half an hour, it isn't going to, and the way it sets the cooling fan to howling suggests it might not be good for my hardware to wait any longer. But on those occasions where it does complete its startup, incredibly, it actually runs and works normally.
If you're patient enough, you can eventually force-quit Parallels, but the process takes about a half hour from the time you decide to kill it until you actually have a useful computer again. I usually don't have that long, so I need to shut the machine down by holding the power button down, knowing that I had some unsaved changes in several open apps when I stupidly tried to launch Parallels.
The only way I can be sure this won't happen is to
1. Uninstall Parallels using the uninstall application on the install disk image,
2. Delete com.parallels.Parallels.plist from ~/Library/Preferences,
3. Run "Repair Permissions" from Disk Utility,
4. Reboot the computer,
5. Install Parallels,
6. Launch Parallels before launching any other programs, and if you anticipate using more than one VM, open them all now because opening them later causes another instance of Parallels to start up and the same issue can occur,
7. Cross fingers.
That's a lot of work to launch an application. I'm not using coherence or doing anything fancy. I used to try to change the keyboard settings, but that doesn't work right anyway, and I've had to trash my preferences so many times I've just gotten used to working with the default settings.
At one point I thought that changing some preference might be corrupting the preferences file, but this is not the case. Whatever gets corrupted does so without any help from me.
If there is another application that Parallels is conflicting with, I have no idea what that might be. I'm not using anything unusual or anything I don't need for my work.
I'm using the latest build (5608) in 10.5.4.
Is anybody else experiencing this, or am I alone being tortured?
