It seems like normally, after a software update, I log onto a developer's forum to complain about all the things that are now broken... but I just updated my Parallels Desktop installation to the latest build (5.0.9344), and the startup time of my Windows XP virtual machine is MUCH faster. Before, the little progress meter always got stuck on "60" for quite some time; now, it spins right through to 100 and comes right up. Well done. FYI, I'm on a MacBook Pro running Leopard (10.5.8) with 4GB of RAM total, 512MB RAM allocated to Windows, and "bridged" networking.