ReactOS working for me
Donnie,
I have Parallels running on my Intel Mac mini with 512 MB of RAM. I selected "other" / "other" for ReactOS, and backed the memory allocation down to 32 MB or so since I haven't upgraded RAM yet. (Try running the SMP version of Folding@Home on this puppy if you REALLY want to make it useless for anything else at the same time!)
If I recall correctly, the installation process (possibly the formatting) was going extremely slowly with the default amount of RAM. That may or may not be what you're seeing.
I was also bit by the "55AA" bug (after the first installation, rebooting claims the VHB or some such doesn't have the correct signature; this is a known issue with ReactOS, the workaround is to reinstall), then I ran into some other problem which necessitated reinstalling a time or two more. But I now have a stable install that I can bring up and shut down (though it doesn't go as far as powering off the VM). The ReactOS wizard is unable to install the audio / bridge / VGA drivers it wants to, and I haven't attempted installing the Parallels tools on the ReactOS machine; not sure how much of this will, or can, work at this stage, so at the moment I haven't even attempted to install and run Firefox on it.
(My goal with Parallels was to run things like Windows-only USB software for my cell phone, WMP 9 to download audiobooks from the library to my wife's MP3 player, and videos over the Web that refuse to run on the Mac or Linux, but I don't have a full version of Windows 2000 or better which is needed for most of these tasks. I suspect it will be a looooooooooong time before ReactOS makes it that far, but it's still an interesting exercise!)
-Charles