Parallels version 12.1.1 seriously damaged my Win 10 VM

Hi Denis,

Thanks for the feedback. My experiences are similar to yours.

The not being able to type issue is indeed addressed by manually starting ctfmon.exe. Your suggestion also seems to speed up the logon experience. Nonetheless, all of these things are mere workarounds. Something happened with an update of PD12 which caused all this (I usually sleep my VM so I only noticed after a very recent reboot). I have enough RAM on my machine and enough assigned to the VM. There is no load on my CPU, neither as reported in macOS or as reported in W10 and I am running a maxed out 2016 MBP13. Something is definitely going wrong...

Still, sign-on is a horribly slow and painful affair (notice how, in the search box, the mic icon also looks out of place while the issue manifests).



Parallels should do more to acknowledge and address this issue properly... really.

 

Rebooting is downright painful. Each time I have to wait for 15-20 minutes for my system to start responding and then have to start ctfmon.exe. I try to just put the VM to sleep instead of rebooting because of it. Agreed that these items should be fixed.

 

Hi Kris.

Thanks for letting me know about ctfmon. I hadn't researching this because I wasn't using the modern apps, but I had to do some app debugging using edge and tried opening ctfmon.exe. Sure enough, it works now.

I'll just pop it into a startup script (batch file,) and hope for the best.

I agree with you about PD needing to fix these issues, but at the same time as long as it works I'll just move on with my life. Sleep is the way to go, I dread Windows updates because they require a reboot and several months ago one of the updates broke my VM beyond repair. It was quicker to reformat, than to research all of the specifics.

You might want to try the Apple hypervisor. I have been using it exclusively for months now and I did try to go back to PD once, but it was slower and more glitchy. YMMV

 

I have personally only experienced these issues on computers with Skylake processors (3 of them!). We have older Mac's that have never experienced this problem. There was a recently discovered Skylake Hyperthreading bug. Could this be related??

http://www.zdnet.com/article/debian...-lake-processors-have-broken-hyper-threading/

 

Thanks for sharing that! The MacOS High Sierra public beta should be out in a matter of days. I'll be doing a backup and then downloading it to try. There's a chance it has these microcode updates build into the kernel and so if it fixes this, I will report back.

 

No change on MacOS High Sierra public beta 1. It seems that the explorer issues on startup are problems with the mapped network drives. It is waiting on them and in my case one mapped drive from a work location where I am not at currently. My guess is that the delay is explorer waiting to time out some sort of network drive operation on boot, likely related to PD tools.

 

i am having a similar issue. i install windows 10 in bootcamp and use it in parallels in mac os. it's affecting 2 of my mac book pros, one is 2015 13' model, and the other is 2017 15'.
have you ever tried to enable boot log and see what's the problematic service/app?

 

Which boot log? It's a post boot, post login issue with the Explorer process. If you have specific things to check, please let me know. Typically this would be in the Event Viewer but I haven't dived in.... last time I looked at event viewer there were tonnes of errors which when I did my research were all related to Parallels. I assume there are certain windows hacks which are baked into the parallels experience and required to make things run the way they do. (entirely speculative)

 

Having the same problem KrisJ1 posted. Although now I can't even login, when I login it simply spins at the welcome screen and never lets me in. I've been using Parallels for years and never had a problem, now I've lost an entire day with still no solution.

Any fix for the login issue or the other issues in this thread?

 

ctdmon.exe worked for me - isn't it a service that should start automatically?
Putting VM to sleep is best way to get around startup problem but as a purist I hate hacks
Now dealing with "not enough disk space" to install on expanding drive - no quick way to convert to permanent disk and no way to guarantee say 5GB free regardless. Wasted two days now "tuning" old VM ready to throw in the towel and go back to VirtualBox. Awaiting fix on login issues but there are recurring themes to problems that are never solved.