Inactivity stalls progress and network

Windows 7 / Parallels 6.0.11828

It seems whenever Parallels is not the active window, the network and other connected devices / drives pause or slow down. At the moment, I'm letting Windows update run and the 4 updates are taking forever while the client window is in the background. As soon as I select the client window the download progress speeds up. I've also noticed that Windows applications that I use that rely on network connectivity stall or crash when the client window is not the active application.

I can always rely on something going wrong while Windows is in the background. These updates apparently required a restart. After clicking the go ahead to restart, and sitting here typing this post, I'm seeing a Start Up Repair dialog stating that Windows was unable to restart. This is the kind of stuff I deal with on a daily basis while Parallels is in the background. If it is left as the active window 10% of the time, things seem to work out much smoother.

I have my Performance set to Faster Virtual Machine, I've enabled Adaptive Hypervisor and have Tune Windows for Speed checked.