Hanging after 5.0 Upgrade

Have a problem that I have not seen covered in this forum yet. I am running Mac OS 10.5.8. I installed Parallels 5.0. I opened a Parallels 4.0 VM. The VM started up just fine, but then froze on the Windows desktop. Even the OS X side of things was extremely sluggish (mouse clicks would not register for 2 minutes). Hard restarted the iMac and the iMac would not get past the blue start up screen. Rebooted from an external hard drive, trashed Parallels 5.0, reinstalled Parallels 4.0, and everything is running fine. Any ideas what went wrong?

Thanks,

 

Similar problem

When I installed Parallels 5, the whole computer was very sluggish (Mac and Parallels). I killed everything and restarted. I reinstalled Parallels a few times, but no matter what I do, it takes about 3 or 4 minutes before Parallels is up and running. Then it's fine.

 

I'll add that I'm running Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.2.

Also, I know it's not the virtual machine itself (Win XP) that is the problem. It's the Parallels main software, because even when I just open Parallels without going into Win XP, Parallels hangs for a few minutes until it finally decides to get over whatever it is it's trying to get over. Then it runs perfectly as if it had been fast all along.

But I can't wait several minutes every time I want to start Parallels. Does anyone have any ideas? If I can't solve this, I'm going to have to go back to the previous version... and hopefully I can still find the installation file.

Suggestions?