I don't know if this is specific to Windows XP or other guest OSes as well. But I've got Win XP running as the only guest OS on my PD 5 installation. Certain features like copy and paste, drag and drop files between guest OSes, and launching the application in the host OS when double clicking the file in the guest OS all work for awhile and then fail. I would have to reinstall Tools, and these features will work for awhile again, before failing. Has anyone experienced this problem too?
I had the same issue moving from 4 to 5, every time I right clicked on a file or folder under File Manager the CPU went sky high and the Windows Egg timer would appear. If I closed the File Manger down then it looked as though my session would be reset as all the running apps would also be closed. Searched on the internet and found an article about this sort of problem being caused by a registry "context menu handler" being badly written. They recommended running some software called "ShellExView" which I did and it presented me with pages of information about various context handlers. My system was running fine before the upgrade but poorly after the upgrade so looked for any Parallels Tools handlers and found two. I disabled both, using the "ShellExView", and my system started to work fine. I then disabled one at a time and found that if I disabled the Parallel tools Shell tools then my system carried on behaving as before. The result is that I can now right click on files and folders and it all works fine. Not sure what I have lost by disabling this feature but at least XP is behaving fine.
I had the same experience as PittsM7757. Right-clicking certain types of items in the desktop took forever. I found ShellExView and used it to identify the Parallels Shared Applications Context Menu handler as the culprit. I disabled it and now I can use the virtual machine without my blood pressure going offchart. Thanks to NirSoft for making ShellExView available for free. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html
