OK, I had some issues installing both Beta 5 and Beta 6 on my iMac and this is what I learned:
I had installed antivirus software on the VM (McAfee) and I have now found that you cannot have this on. Disabling it is not enough. The antivirus protection does something to certain Windows files that Parallels--and in particular, Parallels Tools--expects to find there. The Parallels Tools doesn't work and won't install--it asks for drivers from nonexistent disks. To fix this, I had to remove the protection software, reinstall Windows XP (choosing the "Upgrade" option during install, to preserve programs and settings), and then reinstall Parallels Tools. After Beta 5 I then reinstalled the virus protection and everything worked. When the same thing happened with the Beta 6 installation, I just quit using the virus software.
My Parallels icon on the dock no longer worked. This is because Beta 6 puts the application in a folder together with Image Tools, so I needed to add that location for the dock.
My networking works fine on Default with Beta 6, but somewhere in all this I lost the workgroup and had to set it up again on the VM, after which it worked fine.
Glad to report that Compressor now works as advertised. I used Image Tools first, then Compressor (attaching the CD drive to the Compressor .iso file) but I probably did not need to. This doubled the free space on my expanding disk. It does not seem to be compatible with XP's native defragmenter though which shows lots of fragmented files. Also it takes a LONG time and I had to watch the CPU monitor in the host to assure myself that all was well.
Shared Folders seems to work now, but I still can't get my USB printer recognized.
Last edited: Apr 30, 2006