First, I can not take credit for someone else's suggestion. I don't remember who suggested it, but they were right on with the fix. So I decided to make it more prominent to help others with this issue. I got the crazy black screen after Windows XP locked up on me when I inadvertently l launched IE. I did a hard shut down and then I my Windows XP was all done. Kaput! I got the dreaded BLACK SCREEN after the initial WinXP screen and that was it. Nothing else. I looked at dozens of posts and articles in the knowledge base to find the resolution. I tried a whole bunch of them including: repair Windows, delete the .sav and .mem files (that I couldn't find even while searching for invisible files), and the CHKDSK command. I refused to reinstall Windows because I had enough of that when I used PCs. But nothing worked. That was until someone suggested using a Time Machine back-up of the VM (overwriting the previous one). Well, that's exactly what I did and it worked! I took the back-up from the day before the crash and copied it over the existing defunct Windows XP VM and presto! WinXP came back. Though, I needed to reintegrate a database for a particular program that I'm using back in, otherwise it was back to where I had it. So, thanks to the magic of Time Machine, I was saved the brutal experience of re-installing Windows in my Parallels 4.0 application. Quite frankly I'm a little surprised that this is happening. I never got a black screen when using a PC from my Win2K through XP. I can't really tell whether this is a Parallels issue or a Windows issue or both by some crazy occurrence of the two running together. Whatever the reason, I hope that it is somehow investigated further and fixed because it seems a lot of people are having this problem with both Parallels 3.x and 4.x. Anyway, if you're fortunate enough to be running Time Machine then copy over the last known good version of your WinXP VM and see if that helps. Give the Mac a good restart just to be sure. Good luck! Nick
