This has come up in a couple of threads, and it took me a bit of piecing together to fix it, so I thought I would write it up. Symptom: You upgrade to a beta version. You boot a previously-fine XP image. You see the BIOS screen, you see the XP startup screen with the blue scrolling bar. You see black, but you hear the "welcome" sound. You keep seeing black. You keep seeing black. Solution: 1) Power down XP. You can often do this after booting up just by hitting Alt-F4 and then Enter. If it doesn't seem like that is gracefully shutting you down, just do a force shutdown in Parallels by Actions->Stop. 2) Boot up again. 3) Quickly start pressing F8. You need to do this as soon as you see the BIOS screen. 4) In the text menu that appears, choose "Safe Mode". 5) Boot into Safe Mode. 6) Install the updated Parallels tools with Actions->Install Parallels Tools. 7) Reboot. 8) That should be it.
