Shared Networking works for me now
Strange -- I read through the "known issues" as Alicia suggested and started to go through the troubleshooting process outlined in #17. My Parallels virtual adapters (in System Preferences/Network) have been active (green) from the get go (that was one of the first things I checked when I first noticed the problem) so I proceeded to gather the ifconfig info from the Mac, then moved on to get the ipconfig /all info from my Windows VM. Before I did that, I decided to switch my VM back to Shared Networking (recall that in my case, Bridged Networking worked fine) so that the ipconfig /all would show that the VM was not grabbing an IP address from Parallels -- my original problem. Low and behold, when I switched back to Shared Networking, the damn thing worked fine!! The only change I know for certain has occurred since I reported the original problem is that I recently did a complete cold re-boot (something I rarely do with my MacBook -- heck, I rarely ever do a warm re-boot -- mine mostly just stays running and goes in and out of sleep mode -- works like a charm). Go figure! I seem to be okay for now.