Parallels takes forever to start

I am running Parallels on a quad core Mac Pro. It used to work fine. I have no idea what changed, but now when I start Parallels it takes an unbelievably long time to start. This means 20-30 minutes or even longer. During this time my machine is completely unusable. The mouse cursor still moves, but that's about it. I can't even start Activity Monitor to see what is going on since the machine is so unresponsive.

Any idea what is going on here? It is making it more or less impossible for me to use Parallels.

Thanks in advance,
Matt

 

Same here

I didn't know it would eventually start! I'm pretty sure I waited overnight once. I have an 8-core MacPro, with 10GB RAM.
The symptom is, when I try to launch, the WindowServer process goes to 99% of one core, and effectively locks up the system. If I'm very patient I can use Force Quit from Activity Monitor, but it takes about 15 minutes to get the needed responses from Activity Monitor, and usually it is necessary to restart (power off and reboot) in order to get my system back in a reasonable time.
For a while the problem only happened when I launched Parallels from the Dock, and it worked fine when I double-clicked it in Applications. But then things got better after I deleted the preference plist file. Today, however, that doesn't seem to help.
I'm unable to launch Parallels no matter what I try, my system just locks up, 99.9% anyway. Useless.
I launched it by accident when I double-clicked a .rar file I'd downloaded, and have been fighting it the rest of the evening without progress. I've got the latest OSX and Parallels versions.
Extremely frustrating. This has happened from time to time for near 6 months, still isn't fixed.

 

Try to disable Screen Sharing, or VNC server if you have,
If you are using antivirus on Mac OS, try to disable live scan