Thanks for the reply. I followed the instructions in the KB article and increased video memory to 758 MB. I'm still stuck at the black screen with the image of a blue window. However I noticed something additional. I'm not sure if this was there before, but there are tiny blue dots flashing and varying intervals just above the black screen. The one that flashes the most frequently is under the HDD icon. There is one under the network icon that flashes less often. There is a third under the FDD icon that flashes much less frequently than the other two.
Also, just in case I just wasn't giving Windows enough time to initialize, I let it sit on the black screen overnight and it was still there in the morning.
I'm not sure if this relates, but when I use boot manager to boot directly into Windows, I get a message "Windows cannot access \\Mac\Home\Desktop" and I get a standard desktop without my app icons. I'm wondering if something went wrong when Windows tried to update itself under Parallels. Also, all of this began when Windows performed a major update that took a very long time and had multiple restarts. It seemed like the update never finished and was stuck for more than an hour saying it was 23% done.
And as always seems to be the case, this all happened just when I had a project I was rushing to finish for tonight (Halloween).
Last edited: Oct 31, 2016