I changed the amount of memory I allocated to the VM in the VM configuration (up from 1GB to 1.5GB) and that made Vista want to re-activate. Changes to the NIC too (eg. the MAC address) will do it.
When I had to jump briefly to another machine with the VM a couple of weeks ago due to a system glitch (MacBook Pro screen not waking when the display had been put to sleep), I manually changed to MAC address to be the same as the original machine just to play it safe...
Other wise Parallels is Parallels, though i will caveat that and say during my small emergency, Vista did notice that the old system was running a 2.4GHz Merom (T7700) CPU and the newer on a 2.4GHz Penryn (T8300) - but that didn't cause any issues, even when I put everything back on my main work system.
Last edited: Apr 29, 2008