Know when to leave well enough alone

I struggled to get 4.0 working acceptably and finally did. "Acceptable" for me meant that the performance was halfway decent and the mouse pointer could travel seamlessly between the virtual machine and OS X. I am able to access the OS X file system from within Windows. I can get my work done.

I was here once before but I started messing around with configuration settings to get missing functionality to appear, e.g., being able to access the Windows file system from OS X and getting Shared Applications to work. In the process, I somehow messed up the Parallels tools and my mouse pointer stopped working correctly. I had to restore from backup and do more installation stuff to get back to "normal".

So now I am going to leave well enough alone until a patch comes out. I am going to create a snapshot so I can restore this state if things go wrong. My advice to people like me who want to keep tweaking: DON'T!!

I am also resisting the temptation to say "Goodbye Parallels" and use Fusion. The grass always seems greener on the other side. My guess is that I'll hit different problems with Fusion and I really need to be focusing on real work instead of messing around with my computer.

As someone who works in the software industry, I am astounded at how poorly tested this was. We've all seen buggy first releases. Leopard comes to mind... But this one really is amazingly bad.