Mac Powerpoint dreadfully slow

Trying to run Powerpoint: Mac 2011 at the same time as a Parallels 8 Windows 7 VM and it slows to a crawl. Close Parallels and Powerpoint runs fine. This is on a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with 8gb of memory. Any suggestions for tweaks to get Powerpoint running better?

 

Lower the VM assigned RAM.

 

That was the first thing I tried... It shows recommended as between 512MB and 4GB. It was originally set at 1GB and I lowered it to 768MB and then to 512MB, with no noticeable difference.

I have noticed one other key piece of the puzzle - it seems to only occur when running my macbook pro in dual screen mode. In single screen it seems to work ok.

So, the logic:
Parallels not running - Powerpoint runs fine in dual screen and single screen (mirrored).
Parallels running - Powerpoint runs fine in single screen mode (mirrored) but slows to a crawl when in dual screen.

Any further suggestions?

 

Try assigning one single virtual processor to the VM, 1 GB of memory to the VM, and set the VM to "Mac is faster" in the VM's settings (options tab-> optimization).

 

That is exactly my setup. Still reacting the same.