Is there a Dept. of Annoying Bugs? :)

Running Build 4128: Guest OS Vista

Put Guest OS (Vista) to sleep from inside the guest. I recommend "Sleep" from the Vista shutdown sub menu.

Wait for Vista to sleep.

Click on an OSX window (say like Safari)

Notice annoying Parallels popup asking me if I want to restart VM.

The popup does not happen if on secondary monitor.

The popup does not happen if I put Guest to sleep from Parallels Action Menu.

Go Fix

Some background: Since Parallels seems to consume quite a few CPU cycles when idle, I was writing a little utility to pause the VM shortly after I closed all my (foreground) Windows apps. Might be a nice option to add to the Parallels tools....

 

Next Annoying Bug - SmartSelect Integration

Repro with Office Outlook 2007

Take a Message from Outlook, save it to some place you can access from your Mac. Go to Finder, click on message - select open with and choose Outlook.

Invalid Command Args error message.

Seems SmartSelect isn't as integrated as one would think.


Maybe I should sign up for your beta program and help you all out.

 

MSI Installation Failure

Take a random MSI (I used the .Net 2.0 Compact Framework SP2 from MSDN) and put it on the Mac side.

Try running this MSI in windows \\.PSF\.Home\PathToMSI.

MSI may start but will fail when it tries to copy files. Windows may report that MSI doesn't exist any longer.

Mount \\.PSF to a drive letter like H:

Try again. Everything works.

Go fix.

 

Unable to execute .Net apps located on \\.PSF

Place a .Net application on \\.PSF share. Try to execute. If .Net apps do anything like p/Invoke or any other functions that require security, application will fail.

Map \\.PSF\Whatever to H: Try to execute. Same Problem.

Unable to grant permissions to hidden .PSF server.

Go fix

 

Please keep'em coming

 

More Office 2007 Integration problems

Sent myself a meeting request as an attachment. Opened .ICS file in Mail.app which tried to launch Outlook 2007 (which is how I have it configured.) Received same Invalid command line args error message.

Each item of a different type needs a different command line switch. (Simply doing OUTLOOK.EXE with the path of the file will not work) My guess is that for Office, SmartSelect will have to create a stub app for each item type (Mail, Calendar, Contact, etc.)

For your review:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP010031101033.aspx

 

Mounting an .ISO located in the Guest

Downloaded ISO in Guest and tried to mount that ISO [Devices - CD/DVD - Connect to Image.] ISO was located in guest so from OSX it was [C] Microsoft Windows Vista.

After mounting image, Parallels locked up. I'm sure it was a but much to ask for, but a warning/error should be displayed if the user tries to mount an ISO located in the Guest File System.

Use Case:

I'm a developer, I download software from MSDN all the time and it comes as an ISO. I shouldn't have to copy it from the guest back to the host for it to work, why create 2 copies of a 4 GB ISO when hard disk space might be at a premium...

 

Some Boot Camp partitions still don't just work (displays 'Unable to open disk image Boot Camp' error) if the Boot Camp partition only has drivers.cab in the /WINDOWS/Driver Cache/i386/ folder and not sp2.cab. The solution has been to make a copy of the drivers.cab file and rename it to sp2.cab. This still needs to be fixed AFAIK.

 

Poor responsiveness of \\.PSF Share

Background:

I've remapped the 'My Documents' folder in my guest from C:\Users\Simplicity\My Documents to \\.PSF\.Home\My Documents. This can be done by selecting the My Documents folder in Windows, bringing up Properties, and selecting the location tab.

All is well until I put Parallels to sleep via the Action menu. There are times when the guest loses the handles to the network files when they are open. Say for example I have Outlook open and my .PST/.OST file sits on the share. If I suspend the guest and then resume it, there's a 50/50 chance that when it resumes, Outlook will be frozen or report the file is corrupt or simply tell me to shut down and restart outlook.

I'm worried about the long term chance of data corruption.

Thanks,

 

Not sure if this is a Parallels problem per-se, though Parallels is what creates the .PSF "host" in the first place. My gut feeling is that Windows Installer barfs on the non-standard network "hostname".

 

It could be that windows is "barfing" on the non standard host name, but if Parallels is doing something different than everyone else, it might be up to Parallels to fix it... Unless parallels can prove that they are following the SMB spec perfectly, MS might just say sorry, not our problem. For them to prove it, they will most likely need to repro on a Windows box acting as a file server and a Windows box won't let you name it like that...

My idea would be have a config setting in the .pvs file to let power users change the psf server name. Then only people that care about it will do it.

I noticed in the HOSTS file there is an entry for .psf. I tried adding another one but to no avail.

 

Dangerous Bug with Snapshots

Repro:

1) Configure Guest OS to handle say a mail link.
2) Delete a snapshot - (for me this operation takes several minutes.)
3) While snapshot is being deleted, try selecting a mail link in Host OS

At this point, Parallels will try to start the guest which is in the middle of a delete procedure. For me, the whole thing crashed, parallels, snapshot manager all disappeared.