wohoo! i finally fixed the coherence issue that was bugging me and put the cash down for parallels. coherence and windows now work superbly on my macbook, and rc3 is a great release, no glitches everything works so far for me (fingers crossed!) super exciting. so the culprit - zone alarm internet suite! i don't know what it was doing, i tried messing around with numerous settings but zone alarm does not like coherence! anyone else had this problem? i now have another virus scan, decided to use nod32 which seems to be just there and not noticeable. i can use coherence now with virtue desktops, what a great solution! does coherence work with vista too?
Cool. I've suspected that for many people having issues, the culprit lies on the Windows side of things. Good catch.
Security Program(s) the Culprit? Makes sense. One of Zonealarm security suite's (or other security program's) jobs is to flag any calls to system-level files or to the registry such as happens with the Parallels Tools install process. This may be why I was having problems which were solved by using the Safe mode during the Tools install. The security part of the program was doing its job, questioning any actions which could affect the health of the machine. In Safe mode, Zonealarm doesn't autostart at login, so the Tools install proceeds without incident. The solution would be to turn off auto-starting of Zonealarm or other security suite at XP startup before installing a new beta (or possibly even the new release when it shows up) and turning it back on after everything is working OK. Perhaps there should be a warning to turn off any guest OS security programs before updating Parallels. RCF
I've not seen this kind of problem using Norton SystemWorks in Windows and having it completely operative during the process of updating Parallels.
That makes sense in theory, however when I did a new install of Windows there was no Zone Alarm on it, and Parallels installs Tools. I installed many applications and Zone Alarm was the last thing I put on. I played with lots of settings to try and get it to work with coherence to no avail, including giving coherence and tools full access to the whole system in program control panel. The conflict happens later and simply disabling Zone Alarm doesn't help either, but uninstalling it recitifies the problem. I tried to alter lots of settings with it, but then gave up. Annoying and expensive (I paid for it for use in Bootcamp before I was using parallels) and had to fork out to buy nod32, which doesn't have any problems btw and a virus scanner i would recommend.
Comodo is a great personal firewall that (as far as my experiences go) works great with Parallels. Reviews usually rate it as pretty high protection.