Warning: What is detailed below may crash your installation of XP and/or your Mac. Proceed at your own risk. Although I survived without a problem, YMMV. First of all, if you haven't installed Mac drivers for you USB/Serial GPS unit, it likely will work in XP with Streets and Trips. If you have installed the Mac drivers then you will get the dreaded "In use with another application" message. In this case: Start from a fresh reboot of your Mac. type kextstat in Terminal to find loaded drivers. Note the last number in the left column. Plug in USB/Serial GPS device type kextstat in Terminal to find additional loaded drivers from USB/Serial device. Remove the new ones with the following Terminal command (listed below are the drivers for my GPS device, which has the Prolific PL2303 chipset - yours may be slightly different). sudo kextunload -b nl.bjaelectronics.driver.PL2303 sudo kextunload -b com.prolific.driver.PL2303 Boot Parallels/XP USB/Serial device may auto-conect. If not, select it from the USB icon in lower right corner of Parallels window. Save any open files. Open Streets & Trips and put a check mark in the box by Start GPS Tracking in S&T's GPS Pane. Optional: Watch Xp crash with BSOD (you do have a recent backup of XP, right?) Upon automatic XP Reboot, USB/Serial connection should be already checked off. Now launch S&T and put a check in the box by Start GPS Tracking in S&T's GPS Pane. S&T should: 1. Work! (including the USB/Serial GPS device!). 2. Not crash XP. This should continue to work until you uncheck the Start GPS Tracking box. After this you may crash again. To make your USB/Serial GPS device work in Mac OS X again, you will need to reboot the Mac (easy) or reload the drivers that were removed using terminal (pain in the ass): sudo kextload -b com.prolific.driver.PL2303 and sudo kextload -b nl.bjaelectronics.driver.PL2303 In summary, there are two reasons for making this post. First is to help someone similarly situated. I spent several frustrating hours trying to get this to work before discovering that there was an underlying problem with Parallels. Then I spent several more hours getting this to work. Second is to provide what J. Edgar Hoover would call a clue to the Parallels team about how to fix this. I realize that USB has always been a problem child for Parallels, and that USB/Serial connections have a way of not letting go of ports, even when we are done using them. But if I can get this to work using the brute force method described above, it should be fairly straight-forward for the Parallels team to unload the Mac drivers (or otherwise disable them) so that Windows software can access these devices without making XP cry for it's Mommy. Part of me is inclined to rip SWSoft a new one, Rachel-Faith-Anderson* style because this problem has persisted for so long. We have seen so much improvement with Parallels in general and with USB support in particular. And Serial connections are soooooooooo twentieth century! What gives? How can a legacy issue be so difficult to squash? Very disappointing. Lastly, kudos to everyone who contributed to the thread at http://forums.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=5403 Without this background info, I would still be in the dark. * She's the next Ann Coulter, you know.
I am using Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. It helped to use with my Electronic Logging Devices. Found some integration problem in wine.
