Since Beta 6, I have had some strange kind of 'lock-up' in my guest XP SP2. Where the XP suddenly seems frozen, totally unresponsive while one core of my MBP turns up 100%. I wait for multiple minutes (at least 3), nothing changes. The only cure is to reset the guest. Since it happened a bit more often than I'd like, I have found it is directly related to the Suspend / Resume mechanism and looks more than probably related to networking at the same time. Steps : my XP SP2 is logged on, with network connections established. I Suspend the VM. I Resume the VM : all looks well. I start a shutdown of the guest and it locks up while "disconnecting network connections". It freezes too, if after Resume, I attempt to browse the network through the File Explorer. Though I can boot it, work with it as long as I want, proceed with a shutdown or a restart, I have no issues, unless I Suspend then Resume the guest in-between.
I am having the same problem (MBP, 512MB for VM, 2GB system total, bridged ethernet on default adaptor (AirPort)). Parallels itself is fine (can use the menus, switch views, etc), but the guest OS is well and truly hung, pegging one CPU at 100%, all of it system task. No response at all to ctrl-alt-del, no matter how I generate it. I just saw the hang after a resume from suspended state, though I wasn't shutting down. I had used the network to check some source out of a CVS repository (which worked), launched Visual Studio and went to start a build. That's when it hung (on a dialog).
I have had similar VM hangs related to suspend/resume. I was just using the Windows File Explorer application (not Internet Explorer). I "discovered" that disabling sound in my VM from the Parallels VM edit window, and then trying the same suspend/resume experiments did NOT result in the VM in a hung state. This started with beta 5 and continued with beta 6. Hopefully there is a tweak to be made to how Parallels suspends a VM that overcome these glitches.
I can't speak for Olivier but for me sounds are NOT playing except for the little XP sound clicks that accompany UI actions. I hear these from time to time, usually relating to mouse clicks in new windows. I wish I could turn these off! I hear these clicks on real PCs too. So the hang happens even when no sound is playing, although I have just clicked in a window -- the file explorer window for example -- and perhaps the VM wants to make its little click, can't access the sound driver and then hangs as a result. Does this make sense? Jim
Yes, for me at least, if I disable sound from the VM itself, using the Parallels properties edit window, the VM hang does NOT happen. I can suspend/resume with a Windows File Explorer running before I suspend and when I resume I can pick up using the File Explorer with no hanging behavior. So without sound, I can suspend and resume just like I could in betas 3 and 4 -- no hangs. With betas 5 and 6, I had given up using the suspend/resume feature since I like to have sound enabled and did not want to get my VM to hang when I least expected it. So if you fix your known issue with sound, I suspect that my suspend/resume problems would go away.
Thanks for the status info -- looking forward to getting and trying the next update. I was just going to try to see if I could use the Sound Control Panel in Windows XP to turn off some of the GUI sounds but leave sound enabled in Parallels itself. In fact, I had disabled most, but not all, sounds from inside XP, I re-booted the VM, started up the File browser, left it open, clicked the Parallels suspend button and my host OS re-booted on me without warning. It's been awhile since this happened when using Parallels -- probably back in beta 4. This must be some weird stuff going on with sound in Parallels! Keep up the good work.
Indeed, reviewing the cases where I have seen this happen again since my initial post, it looked network related but indeed is sound related. When I have this issue while shutting down after a Resume, it happens right at the time Windows would play its shutdown sound. And when I had it in the file explorer, it was exactly when it would have played a small tick on opening a folder. So yes, it is definitely sound related after Suspend / Resume and not network related. I have remove the sound card from the VM, I tested only once for now and had no lock up. Will keep trying, but I think the issue is identified.
