Parallels in Catalina: Office 365 (in Windows) crashes the Mac

I added the new boot flag to both of my VMs yesterday. Both VMs are running PowerPoint, Excel and Word. As of the posting of this message they've both been running for over 12 hours with no issues. Prior to this update having them run for 10 minutes before rebooting was impossible, so this boot flag update seems to be working.
 
I added the boot flag, and it stopped the bug from crashing Catalina, but Outlook (Office 365) continues to freeze, and crash the guest Win 10 system. With Parallels 14, I noticed that Outlook appeared to restart at random (usually while in the background), but it did not take the system with it. With Parallels 15, Outlook crashed the guest OS. Without the boot flag, BOOM! Everything would crash to black.
 
Adding the boot flag has now stopped the Parallels Desktop issue from freezing my screens and, two minutes later, crashing my Mac, which is great. Instead, Parallels Desktop now detects the problem (reporting a critical graphics error), suspends Windows, asks me to generate an error report, and then resumes Windows. While still not ideal, it's far better than crashing my entire Mac.
 
Maria@Parallels said:
Hello, guys, the issue is under investigation with the Parallels Engineering Team.
Also could you please add this Boot flag : video.metal=0 (VM Configuration -> Hardware-> Boot order -> Advance settings) and check the issue.
Please share any results with us.
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DO NOT DO THIS. I changed this video.metal=0 flag, and now my windows 10 VM is in an endless loop and will not resume. and you can't change the setting BACK unless you 'resume the VM AND THEN SHUT IT DOWN'. well, I can't resume. What a joke. Don't recommend solutions like this, tech support, without fully testing the suggestion. I have a mid-2017 MacBook Pro with 1tb ssd and 16 gig memory.
 
ChristopherM5 said:
DO NOT DO THIS. I changed this video.metal=0 flag, and now my windows 10 VM is in an endless loop and will not resume. and you can't change the setting BACK unless you 'resume the VM AND THEN SHUT IT DOWN'. well, I can't resume. What a joke. Don't recommend solutions like this, tech support, without fully testing the suggestion. I have a mid-2017 MacBook Pro with 1tb ssd and 16 gig memory.
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Hello, sorry for the inconvenience.
we didn't provide our customers with the untested workarounds.
Could you please collect the tech report after the issue reproduced ad post the report's ID here?
 
ChristopherM5 said:
DO NOT DO THIS. I changed this video.metal=0 flag, and now my windows 10 VM is in an endless loop and will not resume. and you can't change the setting BACK unless you 'resume the VM AND THEN SHUT IT DOWN'. well, I can't resume. What a joke. Don't recommend solutions like this, tech support, without fully testing the suggestion. I have a mid-2017 MacBook Pro with 1tb ssd and 16 gig memory.
Click to expand...

I'm pulling my hair out on this issue. I can go a week with no macOS fatal crash and then I'll have a day with multiple crashes in an hour. Did this "temporary workaround" not help at all?
 
Really disappointed! I can't even open Windows without a complete freeze and then automatic shut down of my entire Mac.
I am running Catalina 10.15.6 on a MacBook Pro 15 inch 2019 2.4 GHz a core I9 32 gigs of memory and an internal Pro Vega 20 4 gig video card. I have the Sonnet Breakaway 550 with a Radeon Pro WX7100 card. Parallels 15.1.4 Pro Edition running Windows 10 Pro which is fully up to date.

This has got to get fixed. Parallels, I spent the last hour reading through this forum, this has been a big problem for a lot of people for over a year!
 
I got the then problem too, running Catalina 10.15 on mac mimi 2018, connected to a mandez egpu with raedon rx590. The OS crashed randomly when using visual studio 2019 and office365 in PD15!!!

This is a critical issue, reported by many users, but the PD team stil do nothing. Maybe fix in next version, with extra payments? That's pd's way!!
 
Sadly this problem does not seem to have been resolved in the latest new version of Parallels Desktop 16. I just had my Mac freeze and then crash with the same error as before, after having removed the boot flag, hoping that it was no longer required. Very disappointing.
 
MatthewB19 said:
Sadly this problem does not seem to have been resolved in the latest new version of Parallels Desktop 16.
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Ridiculous. The only thing that keeps me with Parallels (Pro) is the easy ability to configure VMs to launch at boot (not user login). I'm too lazy to figure out how to do it properly in Fusion or VirtualBox, but I might just be motivated enough to do it once my current Pro subscription ends.
 
After installing the supplemental update to macOS Catalina 10.15.6 yesterday morning, I was rather hopeful that this would finally address the issue given that Virtualization software was explicitly mentioned as the reason for the update. Sadly, the screen freeze and crash has happened yet again, so the issue with Parallels Desktop 15/16 is still not resolved. Back to adding the video.metal=0 advanced bootup option...
 
I have given up on the company completely. After the support folks convinced me to reinstall the latest version, KNOWING that it would crash not just the Windows 10 VM, but also the host Mac, I received absolutely no response to my tech info and ticket update. Sorry folks, but with that kind of 'support' and an ongoing problem with no word about it two full versions later, I'm out.
I'm running the latest version of Parallels 14 available, and trying desperately to find a way to not use Windows, or replace Parallels completely.
I'll keep watching here, but I'm doing my best to warn potential users against going anywhere near this train wreck of company.
 
This is definitely still an issue in version 16, running a fully patched macOS Catalina on a Macbook Pro with Radeon RX 580 eGPU. Trying the video.metal=0 setting which I am hoping "fixes" this but whatever that is doing makes the fans on the laptop run MUCH higher spin speeds.
 
Hello guys, Parallels Desktop 16.0.1. version has been released. Please update your Parallels Desktop to the latest build and check the issue.
 
This issue persists in 16.0.1. Was hopeful, so I shutdown the virtual machine, upgraded to newest version, restarted Mac even though was not prompted to do so, removed the video.metal=0 string, started machine, updated tools, restarted machine, opened Word and the document I knew caused it to restart entire machine and RESTARTED :(. This new release does not address this issue.

However, for me the video.metal=0 in the Boot flags is a fix, so put that back in and continue along. Word and the document that crashes without this flag opens immediately. Maybe next release!
 
Maria@Parallels said:
Hello guys, Parallels Desktop 16.0.1. version has been released. Please update your Parallels Desktop to the latest build and check the issue.
Click to expand...
I'm afraid that this still hasn't resolved the issue for me. I've had Parallels Desktop running for a few hours today, but it has just caused the WindowServer screen freeze and crash again. I've now reinstated the video.metal=0 flag to prevent the issue.
 
Same for me - Parallels was crashing my Mac every time I had a Teams call with video using the FaceTime camera in the Windows OS. Teams and video calls are working fine now with the video.metal=0, so happy with that. I have no idea what it does, or if there are any other side effects from that boot switch, but it works a treat. Thanks very much - I've had to be voice only for the past months with this problem.
 
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