After upgrading to the latest build of Parallels 5 (hopefully to eliminate the slow windows XP load from suspend), Parallels Tools needed to be reinstalled. The first problem was a delay of 30-60s between confirming I wanted to reinstall Parallels Tools and the setup actually initializing. There was nothing (nor even system processes) to indicate that the Parallels Tools installation was about to initialize (I half suspected it might have happened very very quickly). It would be nice if there were a dialog or something to explain what's going on (e.g. "Please wait while Parallels Tools installation initializes") so that a user doesn't close the guest OS as Parallels Tools is beginning to install. But the big problem was during installation. I had Parallels open in Coherence, and was working on the mac (outside of Parallels) when the Parallels Tools setup threw a dialog box to the top focus. I don't know what it was for, because the typing I was doing in the other program managed to dismiss the dialog before it even finished rendering. I believe the dialog was asking me to close Firefox 3 in Windows XP, and my typing ended up canceling the install. As described in this article, this problem would be greatly alleviated if the dialogs in the Parallels Tools installation process (including the one asking to close programs) had a 3 second delay, such as the delay used by Firefox when installing add-ons. (Note that in the linked article, it says that it's OK for a dialog to interrupt a window that is pertinent. Within the guest OS, the dialog I encountered was relevant to the active process--Parallels Tools installation--but while in coherence mode, the host OS active window was also interrupted... In fact, as I typed this in Firefox on the host OS, Parallels was restarting in the background and interrupted my typing many times, despite moving focus to Firefox and command-H-ing Parallels to get it out of my face)
