Icons no longer function

I am running Parallels 8 on Mac Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

When I set up my virtual machines for Red Hat and CentOS, Parallels created aliases/shortcuts on the desktop for these VMs (at least, I think it did, I don't recall doing it).

These Icons were red.

I installed a Windows 8 Pro vm. Now, all the vm icons are blue. Previously all icons would launch the respective vms (Linux and Windows). Now, when I click on the icons, I get the following message in a pop-up:

"The selected virtual hard disk is used by a suspended virtual machine. Do you want to view its contents without modifying it?"

I deleted these icons and created aliases from the vms in the Parallels folder. Same result.

When I installed Ubuntu Linux, no desktop icon was created.

Any idea what happened?

 

Figured out what is happening...

When I looked at the "open with" option for the pvms, the default was "Parallels Mounter (default) 8.0".

When I changed this to "Parallels Desktop" a newly created alias functioned correctly and loaded the vm.

So my question has morphed - what should the "open with" default be? I don't want to mess something else up by changing the default to Parallels Desktop.

BTW, when selecting the "other app..." to "open with", change the selection box ("Enable") from "Recommended Applications" to "All Applications" and check the "Always Open With" check-box