Parallels 8 iTunes 11 compatibility?

Hi,
I am running Parallels 8 (latest updates) on Mountain Lion (latest updates) with a Lion guest (latest updates) on a Macbook Pro Retina. I am having trouble with iTunes (11.0.4 (4) 64 bit) in Lion. Whenever I try to rent a movie I get the spinning beach ball and have to force quit iTunes.

Does anyone have iTunes 11 purchases working in their guest with Parallels 8?

I thought it might be the networking config so I configured it to 'bridged network' with the default adapter selected to ensure the guest was participating on my LAN as if it were a bonefide machine. That didn't help.

I also have Isolate Mac from Virtual Machine set so that the Host operating system stays out of the way of the Guest.

With a little bit of desperation I also tried changing iTunes to run in 32 bit mode. That didn't help either.

oh, and I also did the Authorize This Computer in iTunes just in case messing with the network settings caused some kind of problem. Still no go.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Ty

p.s. I did a little more testing and iTunes will play audio previews of music but any video preview/trailer will cause the area where the video would normally play to go black. The audio comes through ok though. When I go to the menu and select Store->Home the screen doesn't change; it just stays black...

 

Most likely because video requires hardware acceleration, which is not present in OSX Guests (Parallels does not have access to the necessary API to develop the graphics driver), you'll probably notice also that dock animations are more sluggish and so is launchpad, for the same reason.

You must have a very good reason to use iTunes on the Guest rather than the Host, but my first thought was, why doesn't (s)he run iTunes on the host OS X instead?

 

I can understand the drivers causing a problem playing a video. What baffles me is that it won't even go through the process of renting/buying a video. At least if that worked I could stream from the Guest to my AppleTV to watch it. I can't help but think there's some other problem happening with the virtualisation.

reason for guest: my new laptop came with Mountain Lion but I still live in Lion. After Mavericks comes out I'll move to Mountain Lion. I know I'm overly cautious but I always stay one version behind the latest and greatest.