Can't Awaken Full Screen Windows 8.1 Host after Mac Display Goes to Sleep

I am running PD 10.1.1 (28614). I recently created a fresh Windows 8.1 Pro VM and fully patched it. By and large it's working really well, but I ran into a problem last night when I allowed the Mac screen to go to sleep while the Windows VM was in full screen mode.

When I tried to access the VM all I got was a black screen. I could find no way to wake it up. Mouse clicks and keystrokes (Including CMD-CTRL-F) only succeeded in getting the LCD backlight to turn on. I also tried moving the mouse all the way up and to the left just in case I could grab the hot corner. That didn't work. I eventually had to power down the Mac Mini to break out of this condition.

The monitor never got a video signal, it just kept toggling back and forth between analog and digital - the way it does when the Mac is powered down and the monitor is switched on. Because it did respond to events that would normally wake the display by turning on the backlight, it wasn't technically frozen. I know the VM was running all the time because I had it doing a really big file copy (robocopy) operation to my NAS and I could see new files appearing there from another computer, and the network LED was showing intense activity. Windows was running fine behind the black screen - right up until I killed the power.

The Mac requires a password to wake from sleep. Maybe that has something to do with it? The VM is set to never allow the display to sleep. The Mac sleeps after 30 minutes of inactivity, and there was no activity to keep it awake - it was a legitimate sleep.

I've used PD for years and have never seen this before, but this is a new version of PD on a new version of OS/X (Yosemite). Still, it certainly seems the product should be able to handle this condition. It's not exactly an edge case.

So, how do I fix this besides turning off the power saving monitor sleep function on the Mac? I prefer to keep that as it is.

By the way, I can't get over how much faster the networking is on the Windows VM. I can't begin to explain why this is, but the VM is demonstrably and repeatably twice as fast at copying things to other computers and NAS's than the operating system it is running on. The Windows VM can copy across the network at 60 MB/s. The Mac host can only do 30 MB/s to the same target. Maybe not coincidentally, that is the same speed I get when copying things from the VM to the Mac. Bizarre. I'm not complaining, mind you, just puzzling over how the heck that works.

 

I am having the same issue. Is there a resolution?

 

Similar problem: if I simply close the lid on my MacBook to put the machine to sleep, I can count on having to reboot to get things up and running again.