I too like the full screen mode at full native resolution, but don't like it filling up the Mac's screen when I'm out of it. This is an alternate idea to many of those posted and the existing auto-resize capabilities. How about when coming out of full screen mode it just switches to the console window, perhaps with a thumbnail view of the screen? That'd give you the ability to easily toggle back between the Mac and the PC, both at full screen.
If I may add my suggestions to full screen mode handling. I think it would be very nice, if there was an assignable key combination that toggled between the host and the guest os in full screen mode (via the user-defined animation). Basically you click apple-shit-enter in any os x app and get to the VM screen. Clicking apple-shift-enter again get's you back to os x and hide's the vm completely. To emulate this, I'm currently using cmd-H (hide application) for now. but having a key combination that always works to switch back-and-forth between the two operating systems would be very nice.
Even though it is also only a beta for now and quite far from complete, VirtueDesktop ( http://www.virtuedesktops.info/ ) solves a number of wishes regarding full screen switching between PW guest and Mac Desktop. Once its (beta related) gotchas are understood it is a very fine addition. I currently switch back and forth between Mac and XP (full screen == native screen resolution) with a nice 'cube' quick animation. The first thing to do when using VirtueDesktop along with PW is to set PW to use NO transition (they become uneeded).
Hiding the VM Screen I too would like to see an easy ability to toggle between a full screen VM mode and native mode with the VM completely hidden. I have tried VirtueDesktop but have had some issues with it -- I wish Apple would add virtual desktop support to OS X so everything worked seamlessly.
I just want to bump this one. I use Parallels on a MacBook, and having the giant window when in Mac mode is annoying. Resizing has a whole set of other issues that I'd like to avoid. Having the VM window in console mode when not in full-screen would be fantastic. In fact, I was a little surprised that there was no way to do it....everything else is so seamless. -Zandr
An even better alternative perhaps! It's already possible to switch in and out of Parallels using the standard way of switching in and out of apps: cmd-tab. If there were merely something so simple as an option in Parallels to hide it when it's not in the foreground, then cmd-tab would seamlessly switch between full-screen Mac OS and full-screen Windows OS. Alternatively, back to the original idea, there are any number of *other* Mac applications which are activated by hotkeys; would it REALLY be so hard to make Parallels one of them? In Mac OS: hotkey -> switch to full-screen Parallels In Windows: hotkey -> switch to full-screen Mac OS, Parallels hidden I understand that if I were to upgrade to Leopard I could just work around it with Spaces, but this *really* seems like such a simple request that I'm amazed it hasn't been added! I would actually use Parallels if it were this convenient... Thanks... -dave