I purchased Parallels for my mother for one specific Windows program she still wants to use on her Mac. Now that I've upgraded her system to Leopard I wanted to take advantage of Time Machine to back up the data files for this program (since backing up the entire .hdd image is way too slow), so I've moved the data files from Windows to her Mac Documents folder and configured Parallels to access her Mac Documents folder as the Windows My Documents folder. I also showed her that she could launch her application by double-clicking on the data file on the Mac side which she liked over needing to launch Windows and then launch the application. The problem is launching the application from the Finder seems to force Parallels into Coherence mode, even though I have set Options->Booting->Startup Mode to "Single Window" (instead of "Default") thinking that it would force Parallels to always run in Single Window mode. My mother has been horribly confused by the Coherence mode, I've seen evidence that it hides important error dialogs that Windows was presenting on the desktop, and getting out of this mode seems to be inconsistent, sometimes you can simply go to the View menu and select "Single Window", sometimes there IS NO View menu, there's nothing other than the "Parallels Desktop" application menu in the menubar, so you have to shut down Windows and quit Parallels and try again to get the other menu items to appear. So to reduce any confusion and present a consistent interface to my mother I want to ensure that Parallels *NEVER* enters Coherence mode automatically. But I can't seem to figure out how to make this happen. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This is build 5582 by the way, on OS 10.5.1 and Windows XP SP2 in the VM. Thanks in advance.
I've noticed that Parallels remembers my last state... So, if she never selects it, and you don't have a setting that selects it automagically, you should be fine. If you are, indeed, having spotty coverage with your Parallels, I would highly recommend a re-install of Parallels, followed by a re-install of Parallels tools.
That certainly doesn't seem to be what's happening here. If I launch Parallels by clicking on the application icon I always get single window mode, but if I launch Parallels by clicking on a document I always get coherence mode even though I have the startup mode set to Single Window instead of Default. This has persisted across an uninstall / reinstall on her Mac, and I also see it with my install of Parallels on my Mac at work.
Interesting, is opening to coherence mode when opening a file from the OS X side a designed feature, Parallels?
