Tools in 4560 corrupting XP installation?

I have been a relatively happy Parallels user since the early betas, spared many of the heartaches of other users. I am running a MacPro Quad 3 ghz with 6 GB of RAM.

Yesterday, upon being prompted, I upgraded to release 4560. The installation went fine, the host reboot went fine, the tried and tested XPSP2 vm booted fine, and the tools installation launched itself and completed without a hitch. I shut down Parallels, rebooted the mac, and then launched Parallels again.

Now, just after the Windows user interface finishes loading, Parallels crashes. Repeatedly. Reboots of the host do nothing. I uninstalled 4560 and reinstalled 4128. Same thing. Tried a backup VM. Same thing.

Now what? Taken together with the MacBook woes reported in this forum, 4560 appears to be very bad news. It may have been fatal for my installation, unless a new release can fix the problem.

I am happy to submit logs if I knew which ones to submit, and if I thought that it would make a difference.

 

Maybe here you can find sollution for problem with tools.


http://macwindows.com/parallels.html#070907b

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe it is the video drivers; however, my problem was not crashing during the installation of the tools (which the link emphasizes), but rather *after* the installation of the tools. I will see if I can go into safe mode and remove and reinstall the video drivers per the suggestion, as I cannot do so when booting normally--because it crashes after boot.

 

Success!

Well, just for the heck of it, I used the procedure outlined in the link above. even though it wasn't exactly my problem:


Possible fix for problem of Windows crashing with Parallels Tools 3.0 installation | Top of Page |

July 9, 2007

We found a suggestion at VersionTracker.com that claims to solve the problem of Parallels Desktop 3.0 crashing Windows while installing Parallel Tools. Previously, many readers told us that back-grading to the previousl version stopped the problem. John Steele is onle of many who described the problem:

I upgraded to Parallels 3.0 and ever since, the Parallels Tools installer comes up when I restart Windows. If I try to do the install, Parallels crashes every time.

The VersionTracker fix, by Desmond Foulger, includes this suggestion:

I have definitely tracked it down to that part of the installation that is contained within the installation of Shared Applications. I cured it by booting [the Mac] into safe mode with networking (Press F8 at start-up) and navigating into /Program Files/Parallels/Parallels Tools and removing to the Recycle Bin, the whole contents of that folder. Next restarting normally, Win XP comes up normally. Next Install Parallels Tools using a custom install. By a process of elimination I found that installing everything EXCEPT Shared Applications provided the fix.

If you’ve tried this fix please let us know.

However, in addition to deleting the Parallels Tools directory as suggested, I also did an uninstall of tools. Then I rebooted normally, and custom reinstalled tools, unchecking shared applications.

Voila! All is well. So, it's clear that this is the problem, at least in my case.

Thank you for the suggestion. I was beginning to despair of my installation. I should have thought of uninstalling tools, since that was the source of the problem.