Problems setting up Parallels 3.0/Win xp/multiple users

I am trying to configure Parallels, install Windows xp Professional, and set up some shared folders so that I can move my documents from my Windows machine to the Mac and everything will work seamlessly. It ain’t happenin’.

I have a 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with the standard 250 GB hard disk, 1 GB of RAM, and OS X version 10.4.10. The Mac is set up with my admin account, my user account, a user account for my wife, and a ‘guest’ account for visitors. The guest account is only supposed to be able to access the internet (which it can’t, but that isn’t the current problem).

The materials I have read suggest that it is best to not access the internet from the admin account. I am therefore trying to configure the Mac so that the admin account will have minimum software, and all “office†software (Windows, WordPerfect, Word, Excel, Lightroom, etc.) will be in a shared folder accessible by both user accounts but not the guest account. I don’t care either way whether the admin account can access the shared folders.

I first installed MS Office 2004, Adobe Reader, and some photo software (Lightroom and Nikon Scan). Then I installed Parallels 3.0, build 4128 and then performed a typical installation of Win xp Pro (SP2b). Following that I installed WordPerfect in the virtual machine.

At that point Parallels was in my user folder. I called Apple tech support (big mistake!) to get them to help me set up shared folders (at the time I was unaware of this site). The tech rep spent 45 minutes with me, at the end of which Windows was no longer in my user account but had been moved to the admin account, and it could not be moved back to my user account. So not only did I not get the help I needed in setting up shared folders, but Windows was now in the one place that I absolutely did not want it and it could not be moved.

So now the admin account has Parallels, Win xp, and WordPerfect.

My user account has Adobe Reader, Word, Excel, Lightroom, Nikon Scan … and Parallels (but no Win xp).

My wife’s user account has Reader and Word.

According to the Parallels help site under ‘setting up a shared folder,’ step one is to open the ‘Configuration Editor’ and choose ‘Virtual Machine’ from the ‘Edit’ menu. But when I launch Parallels from my user account (the one without Win xp), I get a window entitled ‘OS Installation’ that tells me to select the operating system installation mode. Since the idea is to have one copy of Win xp on my Mac, not multiple copies, that doesn’t seem like the correct path to follow. When I launch Parallels from the admin account, Win xp starts. So that doesn’t work either.

That is the background. My questions are:

1. How do I set up shared applications and documents folders so that both my user account and my wife’s user account can use the same software to access the same data?

2. How do I move Win xp from the admin account, where it seems stuck, to a shared applications folder?

3. And finally, this: I just now received a pop-up advising me to download build 5160. It seems to me that I should wait to do that until all the software, including Parallels, has been moved to a shared applications folder. Or should I download it first?

Despite a few years’ experience beginning with DOS 3.2, I really don’t know diddly about computers, less about Windows, and zip about Macs. Any help which y’all can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!