Much slower than a crawl

I upgraded to 4.0, and my wife planned on doing so. She runs games with hers, I mainly run Forte Agent.

First I upgraded Windows XP's latest changes, then I created an image, then I installed 4.0 saying yes to everything (including backups). Maybe that was a mistake, as I already had a virus checker. I have two virtual partitions, the one I use, and the other which I created from my old Windows machine.

I let it install one firewall package in my new system, shut down Windows, then went to the old system and did the same thing. This took hours. Now it doesn't ask for anything, but I can wait 20 minutes between paging in Forte Agent sometimes, other times it only takes a second or two (my old Parallels didn't have a noticable delay).

I left Parallels running all night last night (that used to give me video errors), hoping that things were installing in the background. But it still is slower than slow. I still get the video setting message on the task bar I used to get for the first minute of a Windows session - those still go away after that. I get a firewall turned off message on my task bar.

My OS X bar has several icons that say "Windows Explorer" when I move my mouse over them. Clicking on them makes some of them go away. I don't know whether to kill applications or wait.

Is there something I missed as part of the installation that makes it actually work?