Parallels was running when the crash happened. What I no longer do is leave it running overnight while the computer is asleep (I don't generally shut down, I just put it to sleep, but no longer with Parallels running). However, that didn't seem to help.
I uninstalled Parallels with AppZapper before upgrading to Leopard but I think that some components got left over. Perhaps I should zap it again fully and try again before I do a full clean reinstall of Leopard and all my applications -- which was not really how I was planning to spend the Christmas vacation...
Another thing I have heard is that these freezes may also have something to do with Rosetta and Office 2004. However, I'm pretty sure that Word/Office weren't running during the crash today.
However, I've also found how I can shut the computer down safely even when the freeze happens: I just need to use screen sharing from my MacBook Pro -- that still works and that way I can now shut down and restart again safely when it happens. And that would seem to indicate that it's keyboard/mouse driver problem.
As a first test I'm going to completely zap and reinstall Parallels tomorrow and try it for a while and see what happens.
Another interesting point: I did a completely clean install of Leopard on a reformatted hard disk on my MacBook Pro and I have absolutely no problems there. So maybe upgrade install is a bad idea after all, even though everyone is trying to claim that it works now. I've never really believed it -- there's just too much that can go wrong...
Last edited: Dec 21, 2007