Okay, I'm an idiot. Here's the story.....
Background
I'm relatively new to the Mac environment. Being a Windows guy for a long time, I set my Mac (Snow Leopard) up the way one typically does in Windows - an Administrator account and a separate lesser-privileged user account (call it USER). This was probably a mistake(??) in the Mac environment .... but it's what I did.
XP Adventures
I had been meaning to migrate my Windows XP Media Center Edition environment with all the Windows apps to a VM on my Mac for a while. I had a brand new copy of Parallels v5 given to me by a friend so I installed Parallels under the USER account on the Mac. I then used Parallels Transporter to migrate the XP MCE environment to the Mac in the USER account. It was only then that I found out that the unused Windows XP Pro key I was going to use to activate the XP install wasn't going to work.
I called Microsoft and asked them if they would 'swap' me a valid MCE key and 'kill' my XP Pro key in a 1:1 exchange. They were amenable to doing this, but because my XP MCE install was a HP OEM install they couldn't do it.
So, I have an XP VM sitting on the Mac taking up disk space which I can't activate, and is hence useless.
--> Question 1: How do I permanently delete the XP VM from the Mac?
Windows 7 Adventures
Since I can't activate the XP environment, and since I'd have to install all my apps manually anyway I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro.
Without thinking about which account I was logged into, I installed Win 7 in Parallels under the Administrator account on the Mac. It installed ok, and I can run Windows 7 from the Mac administrator account, but I can't get access to Windows 7 from the USER account on the Mac
--> Question 2: Can I somehow get access to Windows 7 from the USER account, or do I have to uninstall Windows 7 from the Administrator account and re-install it in the USER account?
Thanks for any help.
Background
I'm relatively new to the Mac environment. Being a Windows guy for a long time, I set my Mac (Snow Leopard) up the way one typically does in Windows - an Administrator account and a separate lesser-privileged user account (call it USER). This was probably a mistake(??) in the Mac environment .... but it's what I did.
XP Adventures
I had been meaning to migrate my Windows XP Media Center Edition environment with all the Windows apps to a VM on my Mac for a while. I had a brand new copy of Parallels v5 given to me by a friend so I installed Parallels under the USER account on the Mac. I then used Parallels Transporter to migrate the XP MCE environment to the Mac in the USER account. It was only then that I found out that the unused Windows XP Pro key I was going to use to activate the XP install wasn't going to work.
I called Microsoft and asked them if they would 'swap' me a valid MCE key and 'kill' my XP Pro key in a 1:1 exchange. They were amenable to doing this, but because my XP MCE install was a HP OEM install they couldn't do it.
So, I have an XP VM sitting on the Mac taking up disk space which I can't activate, and is hence useless.
--> Question 1: How do I permanently delete the XP VM from the Mac?
Windows 7 Adventures
Since I can't activate the XP environment, and since I'd have to install all my apps manually anyway I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro.
Without thinking about which account I was logged into, I installed Win 7 in Parallels under the Administrator account on the Mac. It installed ok, and I can run Windows 7 from the Mac administrator account, but I can't get access to Windows 7 from the USER account on the Mac
--> Question 2: Can I somehow get access to Windows 7 from the USER account, or do I have to uninstall Windows 7 from the Administrator account and re-install it in the USER account?
Thanks for any help.