Parallels 6 - Word is dead

I recently upgraded to 6 (Build 6.0.11822 (Revision 604190; September 14, 2010), to be exact), and I getting the old behaviour of 3, if I remember correctly: it's achingly slow; takes an inordinate amount of time to start up; won't print, though the internet is fully accessible; but a new bug has developed: Word won't work. I start up Word, it opens (slowly, oh so slowly!) I attempt to open an existing document and it hangs: to begin with, everything seems fine, I click of the page and I'm left with a blank screen - whiteout! Except for a blue menu bar announcing that Word is not responding, well duh! After a while the page returns to normal, I click again, and whiteout again! I haven't upgraded(!) to either Vista or 7, I'm still using XP, it's good enough for what I need, which is very little in the Windows world. Still, I'd like to get what I paid for, which is presumably a virtualiser that gives me a useable Windows experience with a serviceable list of Windows features. I'm getting neither.

At my end I'm on an iMac, late 2006, 2 GB ram, and of course I run lots in the background on the mac side. I'm willing to accept given my hardware and my behaviour I'm hobbling Parallels, but am I really crippling it, or is there something I should know?

Any suggestions?

 

Max out your iMac RAM if you can. 2 GB is really low especially if you're running lots of Mac stuff at the same time.

My Mac Pro has 14 GB or RAM but XP is slow when it first starts up. The slowness goes away when all the startup stuff is done.

 

Latest builds have done the trick, all is good again.