well first test results: kinda baffled by the nagscreen telling me to use 412mb RAM max, I have 2gb in there I want to use 1/4th (512MB) and can't now.
It did get me passed the windows installer which is good, to land me inside of windows with a million and one parallels errors, installed parallels tools after that, and the reboot got me into checkdisk repairing a million and one things again. Now safely in windows I'm just gonna let it stay on for a while before attempting anything else to see if it remains ok.
tech stats: MBA, 10.5.1 (don't want the airport screwup macupdate), 5592, winxp, 406 Memory RAM.
will keep you posted.