The domain policy at my work disables the screen saver tab, and sets the screen saver to enable and lock the screen. This happens in the background if I am only using the Mac at the moment, and then causes the background of the computer to become the screen saver and also forcing me to unlock the Windows side. Is there anyway to prevent the from happening (short of disabling the screen saver or making sure I use the Windows side at least every 10 minutes)?
That's not a practical option (especially since I'm in IT at the school). I need to work some method out, hopefully without having to convince my boss to setup an exception in the domain policy for Parallels users (as I won't be the only one).
Sorry, how silly of me! So, when you say the background of the computer becomes the screen saver, what do you mean by "background"? The OS X desktop background (the OS X analog of the Windows wallpaper)? Or the Windows wallpaper? How does it "become the screen saver"? Do you end up with a screen with just that picture with no icons or menu or dock? Or something else that my late-in-the-day caffeine abstinence is preventing me from seeing?
Well, I have the same issue when at work, so I understand where you are coming from. You have 3 options. 1) Never use Coherence at work. The SS will still come up, but only the Parallels window will get locked. 2) Do not log into the domain. OS X can read and write to Windows Domain Shares, so just map what drives you need as OS X shares and then share them through Parallels. I would highly recommend BlueHarvest (google it). It's a cheap shareware app which you can set to prevent Tiger from writing its stupid .DS_Store files all over your domain's directory structure. You can also set it up to not write resource forks to NTFS partitions. 3) Create a new OU for Parallels users, and set the SS timeout to none. There are a lot of downsides to this though so I would recommend items 1 or 2.
As to what he means, if you are running Parallels in coherence mode and in the background, as you are using OS X apps, after the windows "inactivity" timer expires, the windows screen saver becomes the active window and takes up the ENTIRE OS X screen. The only way out of it is to unlock the windows SS. It's quite an annoyance.
I can imagine the annoyance... Have you tried OS Window? What really needs to happen is an exception... I mean, come-on, as long as the Macs have the proper policy for screensavers, the Windows will be fine in that department.
