Parallels 8: Windows 7 Applucations Crash and close withgout warning or initiation.

I am having some major issues with running applications in the Parallels 8 - Windows 7 Ultimate environment. I have spurious and often repeatable issues where applications like IE8, Control Panel, Windows Explorer, Kaspersky Pure 3.0, and MSO load and run and after a few seconds of inactivity (and some time with interaction) these applications "disappear" for no reason at all. Watching them in the Task Manager you can see them while running for a few seconds to about a minute and then the application disappears from the list. There are no crash warnings of errors and no other dialogs associated with the apps crashing.

The iMac 27" is running with OS X Mountain Lion, 4 Gb RAM, and 1 TB HDD. The install of Windows 7 Ultimate was just a simple install of a VM with the provided defaults.

This seems to be a memory issue; but I am not sure. The VM is running in a 1 Gb space as defaulted in the install.

Has anyone experienced this and have you found a resolution for it.

As a side note, the same thing is happening with a 17" MacBook Pro, OS X Lion, 4 GB RAM, and 540 Gb SSD.

 

Yes, I have had the same exact experience on a iMac 27 inch, with Mountain Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate which I use for Office 2010 for work. It just started happening out of the blue a few months ago. I upgraded to Parallels 8 and that didn't really change anything. I started troubleshooting and found and ran a windows diagnostic tool that said my Intel Chipset Drivers were out of date, and found a utility tool at the Intel website that enabled me to update my Intel drivers. That seems to have fixed the problem. For the last several hours I've had crash free time on my Office 2010 applications, which is great improvement. You can get to the Intel Driver Update Utility at: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect

Let us know if this works.

 

Hi Mike,

I appreciate the follow-up. I went out to the Intel site (within IE8 on Win 7 via Parallels 8) and ran their Intel Driver Update Utility; but, all this seems to do is identify the drivers (Current Driver Installed) that you have as opposed to telling you whether it is the most up-to-date driver and does not automatically download a driver that is needed. When I ran the utility the Drivers that it <b>could not find</b> were the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility (Chipset INF) and the Wireless Networking (WiFi) driver. I did detect the Parallels Display Adapter, Parallels Audio Controller, and Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Network Connection Drivers; but, again, I do not know if these are actually the current drivers or not. It did not specifically state that any of the drivers were out of date.

On the assumption that the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility (Chipset INF) is suppose to be installed but is not, I went ahead and downloaded <i>pidenu33.msi</i> from the Intel website after searching under Windows 7; however, I have not installed it yet to find out from you if you remember which drivers you had to update and with which *.msi installation packages.

Do you remember which drivers and versions you updated and for what?

I did run the Windows Systems Diagnostic Report (perfmon /report) and it does indicate excessive paging and states that the available memory on the system is low as well as stating the total physical memory on the system is not capable of handlng the load. This was something that I had actually suspected initially in the first post. It is set at 1Gb (the default that Parallels 8 chose for running Win 7.) Sitting idle, there is only 127 MB available (12%). I wish I had a benchmark on this stuff from a Mac like ours running everything correctly.

This machine is a "refurb" directly from Apple and I went straight to loading Parallels 8 instead of loading 7 which I also have. So obviously, I do not know if the problems also occur in Parallels 7.

I appreciate the help so far. I never would have though to check any of this