Programs sluggish in 4.0.3540

Running Win XP SP3, several of my programs boot up very slowly, and they're are very sluggish with commands once they're running. For example, a 47-page MS Word document takes about 2 1/2 minutes to boot up; closing the file is also a major production, time-wise. Ditto for several other programs, but in general every application loads markedly slower than it did in 3.0.

I've reinstalled several of the programs, which had no effect on the problem. I reinstalled Win XP, which also had no effect; ditto for turning off my anti-virus software and firewall, uninstalling and reinstalling Parallels Tools, and running Advanced System Care Pro 3.

Recently Parallels "crashed" and I got the error message, "Unable to connect to Parallels service." Although when I rebooted the Mac, the problem had cleared up.

Now I'm wondering if it's possible to reinstall PD desktop (maybe the latest build will do better) without losing my installed Win programs and data files, and where I can find detailed instructions to do that. Or is there some other suggested fix for this problem?

 

Parallels Desktop reinstallation doesn't affect Virtual machine, but any way backup of VM is highly appreciated

 

Is there any place I can find detailed instructions on uninstalling and reinstalling Parallels Desktop?

 

http://kb.parallels.com/en/5715
or just use Install Parallels Desktop application and Uninstall Parallels Desktop application