V4? Sorry, but I'm going back to V3.

Here is my story of woe.

I get an email telling me that I qualify for a free upgrade to V4. I downloaded 170Mb, installed it then began the upgrade process of my (small) Windows XP installation.

After 45 minutes of reading the (very pretty) 'info screens' I got an error message saying that my machine could not be upgraded, I clicked OK (wishing that I had taken that backup...) and was immediately delivered to my XP install. This said that I needed to locate a file on my XP disk so I fed the disk in, files located and then I was told to reboot. The 'upgrade' process started again. After another 45 minutes, I got another error. Once again I fed in the XP disk and rebooted. The upgrade process began once again. 45 minutes later, I read that the upgrade has been a success and I can use my machine - hurrah! I started to use it, noticed that it had been allocated 128Mb of video ram, reduced this to 8Mb and rebooted. The upgrade process began again. 45 minutes later, another error message, clicking on this delivers me to my XP install and I am asked for a file from my XP disk (hall.dll ??) so I provide the disk again, and all goes well. On rebooting, yes, the upgrade process starts again. From this point on, each time I start the machine, the upgrade process starts, fails to complete, I'm asked for 'hall.dll', asked to reboot and on and on for ever more.

Fed up with this, I try a different tack. I start an entirely new XP install with the intention of using Parallels Explorer to copy information from the old install to the new. After this is done, I tried to install Parallels Tools. Parallels crashes. I reboot XP, starts up, try to install Tools, Parallels crashes. After the third crash, shout obscenities at the computer and uninstall V4, then reinstall V3.

As luck would have it, uninstalling V4 'restored' the original disk for XP as it had obviously failed to upgrade it totally, so after installing Parallels Tools for V3 I am back in operation. Small comfort.

Perhaps V4 is working for some, but I think I'll stick with V3. That does at least work. It may not be (potentially) as fast as V4, but what good is speed, when it won't start up?