same problem on 2009 iMac
I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out what is causing the kernel panics on my early 2009 iMac. It started BEFORE I did the upgrade to Lion, but did seem to coincide with a Parallels update.
I have a two Macbook Pros running parallels and have had no issues on those computers. Both are running Lion and the current version of Parallels. I have WinXp on all computers.
I ran the hardware test both fast and extended several times and it showed no errors with memory or hard drive. I repaired disk permissions and checked the drive. Then, I upgraded memory to 8GB, then I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of Lion. Everything seemed to be running fine till I restored my virtual machine and opened windows.
The odd thing with mine is that it seems to be related to using video in Mac mode. When it would hang would be if I happened to open a site with Safari that had a video like YouTube or a yahoo news site that had a video clip.
I have sent panic reports to Apple, but didn't connect it to Parallels. I have read that there is a firmware support for the 27in iMacs, but not for the older ones. I have an NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 512mb graphics card.
I called Apple hardware support and they said to take the computer to the Apple store. I don't really want to spend the money to do this since I think it is software related.
It's really making me nuts...I don't want to buy a new computer right now...