Parallels Bug/Startup Bomb (Multiple Monitors)

Hello all -

This post is just so that anyone else having a problem with Parallels will understand what's up without having to spend the $30 to speak to someone.

I have a Mac Pro with 3 video cards and 6 monitors - but that's the upgrade. I started with the Mac Pro, 2 cards and only 4 monitors. Parallels ran great. I installed the new card and 2 new monitors a while back and had not run Parallels for a while. When I start it up, it simply does the "Application Parallels has exited unexpectedly" and offers me an ignore, report or relaunch option. Nothing at all fixed it or would allow it to even start.

I purchased an incident worth of phone support (this is horrible, actually - I'm doing their triage on why Parallels doesn't work correctly and paying for it as well) and we finally managed to ascertain that Parallels will work with 2 cards x 4 monitors, but no more. It is a bug in the way that they wrote the drivers and there is no patch. I am told that Parallels 4 will fix this problem, and that the beta for that will be out soon, but there is no patch for 3.x.

The only workaround that was offered was for me to unplug the video connections from the two new monitors, restart my mac, start Parallels (As advertised, it did work just fine then) and then plug in my monitors and scan for displays. Unfortunately, with Parallels running, the scan for displays made a horrible mess of my resolutions and layout and, in fact, put the Apple menus on the top of BOTH monitors 5 & 6. This is not a workaround at all, you needn't even try it.

So my work around is to unplug two monitors, reboot, then use Parallels, then when I'm done, shut down, plug them back in and start up again. This is an unacceptable situation (given what I do, it takes many minutes for me to do a reboot cycle and get everything running and reconnected to the outside world) but I am unable to make a switch to other software at this time. So I'll be waiting (rather impatiently, I'm afraid) to see if the developers get it right this time.

If you have questions about my setup or issues, please contact me at my forum: http://www.perkiset.org/forum/

... and I'll happily let you know any updates or other workarounds that I have found.

Go well,
/perk

 

Probably some misunderstanding, as I get description from support,
Solution suggested was, unplug monitor start Parallels and plug in monitors back, when Parallels is running
I am going to submit this situation as problem description to development team.

If others have the similar situation, please reply request here to see the severity of problem

 

When you simply unplug the monitors, OS-X still considers the monitor buffers to be alive. This can be seen if you open Spaces - the configuration of the monitors is still there. When I started Parallels it behaved the same. So I unplugged the graphics cable and rebooted, then the monitors are not "there" and Parallels starts up. Plugging the monitors back in does nothing... the Mac does not see their existence. If you then do a Display Scan it will find them, but the resulting mess of your screen layout is horrible.

I get from my own forum that there aren't that many people using more than 4 monitors, so I doubt you'll see many folks with this trouble.