Spontaneous VM Starts

J

jackalope

Bit poster
I have a recurring event happening when I'm using Parallels in a Windows XP VM. I'll be happily (well not so happily since I'm using Windows) typing along and all of a sudden Parallels will fire up a second VM with an alternate configuration and HDD. I have a couple VMs due to various different configs that I need to have around.

Any idea what is causing the spontaneous additional VMs to appear and how to stop them from appearing?

Thanks,

Jack
 
Same thing here. Not sure why, but it started after updating to 3106b3.

The main problem is that if I have two VMs open, my machine dogs out due to lack of RAM. I tried hiding the hard drive image, but the RAM still gets allocated when the second VM tries to start.

I just noticed that it started the second VM when I started AVG anti-virus in the first XP VM. I'm not sure if that's the only trigger or not.

iMac 20" 2.0ghz, 1 gig ram. 10.4.8
 
I've turned off the virus scanner in the XP instance, but the problem persists.

It seems to occur when a windows program is starting.
 
I have a theory...Parallels now creates psuedo-apps in the Parallels directory (where the VMs are held) so that you can just launch the VM and app right from OSX. My theory is that when inside a VM, the Parallels tools is interceping the app launch and starting up the VM that was originally associated with that application, rather than the current VM running. For example, one day I start notepad from VM 'A', Parallels creates an app shortcut in OSX that says Notepad belongs to VM 'A'. Then later I'm running VM 'B' and some program starts up Notepad. Parallels detects that and infers that VM 'A' needs to start notepad because it was requested by the user.

I've deleted all my Windows app shortcuts from OSX to test this theory.
 
Not to have a conversation with myself, but...I confirmed the theory. Here are the steps:
1) Clear Documents/Parallels/Windows Applications of all apps.
2) Went into VM-A and started firefox. Parallels creates the Parallels/Windows Applications/Firefox icon
3) Stopped VM-A
4) Start VM-B
5) Start->Programs->Firefox
6) Firefox starts in VM-B, and Parallels starts VM-A with firefox

So, it looks like Parallels is getting confused about the 'Favorite Applications' functionality. This is a new section in the Parallels Tools, but it cannot be disabled in version 3210.

The only workaround right now is to clean out the Parallels/Windows Applications folder between running different VMs

jack
 
Thanks Jackalope. That makes sense. It's also possible that I cloned one of the VMs, which might have further confused Parallels.

I noticed that when there is more than one VM in a folder, they seem to share a Windows Applications folder. That causes duplicates of the pseudo apps, which might confuse Parallels.

In the future, I'll try keeping each VM in it's own sub folder, so that it doesn't share a Windows Applications folder.

For now, quick testing of your theory looks promising. I was able to start AVG without a second VM starting up.
 
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