Many times I have encountered an extremely annoying behavior of Parallels with an active Windows guest OS and I can't figure out if I am doing something wrong or that is the way it is. My setup is OS X 10.6, Parallels 5.0, Vista Ultimate and Windows 7 Ultimate all running on a MacBook Pro. Here is the complaint I have: Windows 7 is the active, and only, guest OS running. In Finder I will double click on a Windows executable located in the OS X file system. Now instead of the app launching in the already running Windows 7 VM Parallels will start up the Vista guest OS and launch the executable in that VM. Of course I now have two VM's running simultaneously with all kinds of strange results. So my question is what is the problem with Parallels? Doesn't it know a VM is already running? Am I missing something in Parallels Tools? The only way I can launch a Windows executable located in OS X file system is to open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder containing the target executable. Note I get the same behavior if the active VM is Vista.
