I'm using Excel 2003 on an XP guest on an iMac running PD 7.0.15095. Something is slowing down the startup of Excel programs. Excel itself isn't slow, it snaps open like you'd expect, but when I start an Excel VBA procedure it takes up to 30 seconds before it even starts to run the code. I keep a backup VM that doesn't experience this slowdown, and when things get REALLY slow on my working VM, I replace it with the spare and everything speeds up again. My VBA now starts up in 5 seconds instead of 30 seconds. Over the course of about 20 working hours with Excel, the slowdown gradually gets worse and worse until it becomes necessary to replace my VM again. When I watch the background processes going on during this startup time (with ProcessWatcher), there's essentially NOTHING going on. No disk accesses, 2% CPU usage, and no new processes starting up. So it's apparently waiting for something to happen. Could somebody speculate as to what it's waiting for and how I can fix this? I don't know for sure that Parallels is the problem because I don't have a 'real' PC to compare with, but it looks suspicious. I've tried the usual things like emptying the Temp folders, defragging the VM, and totally isolating the PC from the Mac, but nothing makes any difference.
