Original install of Win XP began running in a continuous loop - would not boot up

Using Paralles Desktop 7 for Mac, I've been running Windows XP on my iMac since I bought it about 8 months ago. So far, it's been trouble free. But a few days ago, Windows downloaded a system update and from that night on, Windows would not boot up any longer. The startup screen pops up (as normal), but from that point on, it just runs in a loop, generating an error message (that I'm not fast enough to be able to read) and then I lose control of the mouse... even on the Mac side (I'm running Windows on the second monitor, with Lion on the primary). And it's really h#ll to get the mouse to come back so I can exit the Windows startup.

So I loaded Windows XP again into Parallels. I wanted to over-write that corrupt copy, but I apparently didn't know how to do that. So now I have two copies of Windows ("XP" and "XP1") on my machine, including the original one that doesn't boot up and creates the loop, that's still a default for many of my files (Word, Excel, etc.). So when I try to open those files, they cause the corrupt version of Windows to try to open/boot up.

So... do I need to transfer the Excel, Word, etc. program files from the old "XP" (corrupt) to the new "XP1" download or re-associate them to the new "XP1" download - and how do I do that? And then (big question) how do I delete that first/corrupt Windows download? Also, any ideas on what might have caused this? I was using an original/OEM version of Windows from a CD - but that automatic system update seemed to do something evil to my system.

Any help from anyone is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks!

 

I would recommend opening up your old XP VM with Parallels Mounter, that way it gets mounted on your Mac as a hard drive. You can copy off any files you need from it. You can then remove it by ejecting the drive, right clicking on that VM entry in the Parallels Desktop list, and choosing remove. It will give you the option of keeping the file or moving it to Trash.

You will need to reinstall your apps (like Microsoft Office) in the new VM. I include my VMs in my regular Time Machine backups, and more than once I've had to go back and dig out a VM to reuse because I've done something weird. But this has been mostly on my Linux VMs. I've patched my XP VMs with all the Microsoft patches and have not experienced any problems, so give what you've stated I cannot even guess why that happened.