I've been running Parallels Desktop 7 for about a year without incident, but this seems to be a rather serious issue. I hadn't installed any updates for Windows 7 in quite a while so I decided to do today. Everything was fine for a while - I had my screen flicker to black a couple times for about a second but resume working normally right afterward and that was it. Tonight, about 7-8 hours after installing the updates, the computer is essentially unusable. I was able to turn it on a few times, but after anywhere between 10-20 minutes of use, the screen goes to black (or in one case a lovely gray screen with a barred pattern), the sound repeatedly skips and there is no hope of recovering any functionality. Upon restarting the computer, it's stuck on the white bootup screen and won't go anywhere. I was able to start the computer once so I'm hoping I'll be able to do so again and attempt to fix this. I did a system restore (on the Windows partition) to about a week ago and that didn't fix anything, so I'm wondering if anyone here knows what may have happened and and could provide any advice as to how to go about fixing it. Thanks in advance.
You can either roll back to your Time Machine backup (if you use it on the Mac and it backs up your VM) or run Windows repair as suggested at http://kb.parallels.com/5223
