How I got a very good P5/Win7 experience

Since I bought Parallels 5 early November, I played a lot with the system to make it work as smoothly as possible. I'm pretty happy now so I'd like to share my experience.

I'm running Windows 7 on a virtual HD on a late 2008 MacBook Air, which is a memory-and-speed-challenged machine as modern Macs go: 1.6 GHz Core Duo 2, 2 Gigs of RAM (of which 256 are used for the nVidia Graphics Card).

These are my settings:

-32 Gig fixed size HD, located on the Mac's internal HD
-768 MB memory for the VM
-128 MB Graphics memory for the VM
-Optimized for OSX (although there seems to be no difference to having the system optimized for the VM)
Smart Mouse: off
-Optimise keys for games (not sure what this is in English - I'm running a German version of Parallels 5)

-The VM runs in full screen (no coherence, crystal or similar) - I've set up a Space for this
-I deinstalled (and then manually removed) StarColor (or whatever the skinning app that MacLook uses is called) from the VM's hard drive
-I renamed some of the folders within the C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Parallels Tools directory on the VM's hard drive in order to hopefully prevent applications that I don't need from loading: Applications, Services, ShellExtensions, SIA
-plus I downloaded a RealTek sound driver from their website and installed it over the default sound driver.

Now Parallels is running veeery smoooothly, everything is quite fluid, games perfom very, very well (tested with Battle for Middle Earth, Warhammer 40,000 and Icewind Dale), and the Mac is still responsive enough for me to check mails with Entourage on the Mac side. (Don't ask. The company I work for has very odd rules as regards email access.)

Would be interesting to see how others are running their system.