Display freeze with Parallels?

Anyone else had their machine GUI lock up on them while using Parallels? This often happens briefly while starting up a virtual machine; any animated features in Mac OS X stop responding (e.g., menubar items like MenuMeter, Dock icons like Activity Monitor). iTunes keeps playing fine, though.

More rarely, when the machine is getting a memory workout (Parallels running, lots of tabs going in web browser), the OS X GUI completely locks up and only a restart gets me out of it. Again, iTunes is still playing in the background fine. For example, this afternoon, it locked up on me and I let it sit there 5-10 minutes before deciding it wasn't coming back.

The common thread here appears to be Parallels. I'm not sure if it is due to Parallels itself or some kind of virtual memory bug surfacing. This same problem has occurred with the last few builds of Parallels. Now running 3150, OS X 10.4.8, MBP, 2GB memory.

 

I had just the Parallels GUI lock up on me with a USB device insertion and removal that failed. After that none of the current windows programs open would respond. All MacOS stuff was fine but Parallels GUI was dead. Parallels would respond, IE I could select it, suspend and resume the machine but nothing inside of it would work.

In my case what triggered it was USB device.

 

Mine just locked up on me after a long session with Parallels/winXP (by long I mean about an hour of sharing some powerpoint slides over an internal network). I accidentally hit the start menu, when the menu popped up, Parallels froze, the fan came on, and within about 30 seconds the entire Mac GUI was hung. Had to power down. Build 1970.

 

I have had Parallels hang my machine many times in a way that sounds very similar to this. The machine never hangs otherwise, but almost every time I run Parallels it ends up this way (unless I can quickly accomplish what I need to do and exit before it crashes.)

Very, very frustrating. It's like the product is SOOO close, but it is clearly not there.

Rick

 

I'm having this same freezing problem.

I'm having this same freezing problem.

If I use something like Sony Location Free player or Beyond TV Link player it ramps my CPU usage way up for Parallels and on the Mac side SystemUIServer stops responding. If you run Activity Monitor you'll see SystemUIServer turn red and it says something like not responding.

The symptoms when SystemUIServer stops responding that I have noticed are the clock stops working, can't make screen captures, all my network activity stops, Windows freezes completely, can't quit parallels but can access menus but nothing works. When I try to forcequit Parallels it remains in the dock.

This only started about one week ago and I'm not sure what kicked it off. I have reset the PMU but that did nothing. I just did an Archive & Install and I'm waiting to see what happens.

Please post if you have any success with this issue.

I've confirmed this problem on build 3120, 3150 and 3170
I'm running 10.4.8 on a Macbook Pro 17" with 2 GB of Ram.
Currently Parallels is set to 8GB HD, 768 Ram, 32MB VRam

thx,
-Brian

 

Started in 3150 now more regular in 3170

I'll be working away and then the mouse cursor will just stop moving, no the mouse is still moving, because i can move the ghost mouse down to start and shut down. all the while the visible mouse just stays locked in one position

When windows shuts down, mouse resumes normal operations.

can I ask what yall in this thread have set for eye candy? (Parallels Desktop/Preference/Apperance)
I have them all set off.

reason for asking is that in previous builds Parallels have said to turn on one or another of these.
I am refusing to do that now and sending more of these things via the beta@parallels.com

 

Ben I think your issue is different than the rest of us.

I did an archive and install 2 days ago and haven't seen the problem since. I don't know what goes bad that causes it but an Archive and Install seems to take care of it for me anyhow.

Can someone else let us know if they are still seeing this issue?

thx,
Brian