Parallels version 12.1.1 seriously damaged my Win 10 VM

Thank you @RogerH6. I submitted a ticket and I encourage anyone who has this issue to also do so. First, from Parallel's Help Menu choose "Submit Technical Data". After submitting then save the technical submission code, you will need it for the support ticket. Then be sure to log into your account and get your "support code" -- it is a different number. Go here to open the ticket. I have found that Parallels support usually responds with some off the way unrelated questions; follow the process all the way to the end. They normally close the first ticket you submit with "not our problem". That's their SOP. So, then open a second ticket. Sometimes you need to open a third ticket. Parallels Support is a luck-of-the-draw operation. Eventually, if you are patient, you'll get a technician who cares enough to pursue the issue and not dismiss you.
 
This sounds much like issue i'm having. after upgrading to parallels 12, my windows 10 vm broke after upgrading tools, and restarting. i was able to revert to an older snapshot and it works. I've had to revert back everytime tools is installed and then the vm is restarted. Then this morning parallels desktop did an update, which then wanted to reinstall tools, and you guessed it. my windows 10 was broke. I even followed another suggestion of adding an additional ADMIN user but doesn't matter who i log in as, the vm is not usable. This is crap!!! i use this vm for remoting to work and it breaks at the most inconvenient times!
is there hope for a fix??
 
i was convinced it was parallels tools. I opened ticket and support said it was a known windows 10 issue and microsoft is working on it. He tried some things but no luck. I still thought it was tools. That seemed to be the denominator. Things worked unless i updated tools and restarted. i could roll back and things would work until tools tried to update. I was convinced it was parallels. I went so far as to trying a fresh win10 install on fusion. And i had the same issue. wow. So now i decided it had to be something in windows 10. I dug deeper and found this link. This resolved my issue. ymmv. Good luck all - basically fix was to open task mgr and launch powershell as administrator and run

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

The link was from -
 
I am so sorry that I upgraded to V12. I'm running WinXP and Parallels version up thru 11 worked beautifully. Ever since going to V12 I've had nothing but issues. V12.1.2 would work, but every time I went into Desktop, I had to hit "Reset" and relaunch Windows before ANYTHING would work. After putting up with that for several weeks, I saw that they had an update to V12.1.3 and I hoped that would work better. WRONG!! It is far worse. The update never completed. It got half way thru and then gave me the "Unable to Connect To Parallels Service" error message. I followed the link to the knowledge base for that and tried everything in their instructions about the terminal. That didn't work. I then tried to uninstall V12 by clicking and dragging the icon to the trash bin, but all that did was have Parallels try to launch again and I was back to the "Unable to Connect To Parallels Service" error message. I tried to get a chat session going (even paid the $19.95), but have not been successful. I suppose they are dodging help calls because they don't know how to fix this mess. This is the absolute worst "upgrade" I've ever experienced.
Update @3:48 PM EST: Customer support got back to me. Support person took over my computer and downloaded a zip file (I think it was PDuninstall) that he used to uninstall Parallels Desktop from my iMac. He then installed the Version 12.1.3 that had started this whole mess. He did get it to complete the installation and everything seems to be working again. Also, he said he would credit my charge account for the $19.95 because I had only updated to V12 in early December of 2016. I'll keep my fingers crossed and may skip the next "Update". Version 12 has been nothing but a headache. I wish I had stayed with V11. It appears that uninstalling V12 is necessary before installing an update. You would think they would build that into the update process, but what do I know. Also, in the knowledge base they should have a link to the uninstaller if that is what they want you to do.
 
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Thought I was going crazy here. I recently picked up V12, installed Windows 10 and all my development tools on it and everything worked great. Then the update came out and I'm experiencing all of the symptoms described above. Very frustrating. The startup is so painfully slow that I fire it up and go away for about 15-20 minutes and then it eventually decides to start responding. I've wasted countless hours trying all of the things mentioned above and nothing works. He is to hoping Parallels actually does something about this.
 
I beginning to wonder if Parallels 12 has damaged my VM as well. Every week I get a total system freeze that requires a hard reset. I can't tell if it's macOS or the VM that's causing it because it's totally random. I just know this never happened when I ran Parallels 11.
 
A question to those with this problem.

I notices JackF1, mentioned installing development tools. My virtual machines are all used for development work, and so I have the Microsoft performance monitor with a number of counter enabled, together with a number of languages loaded. Right at the start I noted that the issue was reflected in the performance logs with a whole lot of things relating to the scheduler not starting. I'm wondering if the 'common thing' for those having problems here is that there are 'development' machines?.

Comments?.
 
I'm having all these same problems with version 12 ...... very long startup time; handle not valid message; disappearing Quick Bar/Task Bar; lots of general problems with my Windows 10. Also, I've noticed random system freezes on my Mac that I never had before.... total freeze ups that required powering off and reboot. That only happens when Parallels is running.

So, I'm ready to ditch this version 12 until they can figure out the problem. I downloaded version 11, have my upgrade code from the previous version. If I uninstall Parallels 12 and Toolbox, can I just reinstall PD 11 and its Toolbox and use my same Windows 10 pvm?

Thanks!
 
Same story here. Since October/November last year I'm facing this issue. After reinstalling the whole paralells + windows it works again for some time until it's the same again.

Windows takes about 10 minutes to start, "handle is invalid" followed by access issues. As soon as I see my desktop it takes another 5-10 minutes I can use the startmenu or start any program.
I checked the forum but it looks to me like paralells doesn't really react on this problem. There is no real solution no nothing.

I tried to:
- reinstall parallel tools
- reinstall windows
- check file system
- and every "fix" mentioned by parallels technicians

Even the paralell's supporters in here are speaking about a "fix" if someone recovers an old state of his virtual machine? I'm sorry that can't be the way to handle this.
I'm very disappointed about the way this isssue gets handled. I enjoyed using parallel's some years ago but at moment it's just a waste of time and money.
 
PaulKorm said:
Thank you @RogerH6. I submitted a ticket and I encourage anyone who has this issue to also do so. First, from Parallel's Help Menu choose "Submit Technical Data". After submitting then save the technical submission code, you will need it for the support ticket. Then be sure to log into your account and get your "support code" -- it is a different number. Go here to open the ticket. I have found that Parallels support usually responds with some off the way unrelated questions; follow the process all the way to the end. They normally close the first ticket you submit with "not our problem". That's their SOP. So, then open a second ticket. Sometimes you need to open a third ticket. Parallels Support is a luck-of-the-draw operation. Eventually, if you are patient, you'll get a technician who cares enough to pursue the issue and not dismiss you.
Click to expand...

you are joking?
 
Gaeng said:
Even the paralell's supporters in here are speaking about a "fix" if someone recovers an old state of his virtual machine? I'm sorry that can't be the way to handle this.
I'm very disappointed about the way this isssue gets handled. I enjoyed using parallel's some years ago but at moment it's just a waste of time and money.
Click to expand...

Sure doesn't seem to be garnering much attention from them. Very frustrating to deal with this.
 
I've had the same problems as a lot of others on this forum with version 12. I decided to rollback to version 11 which had been trouble free for me. I used Clean My Mac to uninstall Parallels 12 and its Toolbox. I downloaded a fresh version of PD 11 and installed it and tried using the same pvm that I had used with version 12. That didn't work so well! Same problems as before which tells me it is likely that PD 12 damaged my Win 10 pvm somehow. So I created a new Windows 10 pvm. It installed just fine but wouldn't authenticate Windows, but after a call to Windows Support, it was authenticated and everything is running very well. Of course, I had to reinstall a few apps, but that wasn't a big problem. So far, so good. No startup problems and no other issues. The only issue I haven't verified that has been fixed is the random system crashes on my Mac. Time will tell on that one but I'm a happy camper right now. Hopefully, the Parallels folks will get version 12 figured out and fixed. It irks me that I paid $50 for that upgrade and it's unusable to me!
 
I have about 20 or so apps installed so I really don't want to have do a clean install and then reinstall everything.
 
StacyJ said:
i was convinced it was parallels tools. I opened ticket and support said it was a known windows 10 issue and microsoft is working on it. He tried some things but no luck. I still thought it was tools. That seemed to be the denominator. Things worked unless i updated tools and restarted. i could roll back and things would work until tools tried to update. I was convinced it was parallels. I went so far as to trying a fresh win10 install on fusion. And i had the same issue. wow. So now i decided it had to be something in windows 10. I dug deeper and found this link. This resolved my issue. ymmv. Good luck all - basically fix was to open task mgr and launch powershell as administrator and run

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

The link was from -
Click to expand...
Wouldn't solve my problem. Windows (10) doesn't even load. I get a black screen with a mouse pointer. I can move the pointer but cab do nothing. Maybe I should leave the Macbook sitting therefor 15 minutes to see if it does boot in the end!
 
JimH6 said:
Wouldn't solve my problem. Windows (10) doesn't even load. I get a black screen with a mouse pointer. I can move the pointer but cab do nothing. Maybe I should leave the Macbook sitting therefor 15 minutes to see if it does boot in the end!
Click to expand...

That is what I have to do. I haven't timed it, but if I wait a literal 20 minutes or so it eventually wakes up.
 
Just bought Parallels 12 and Windows 10 today and here I am. Exact same issue as many of you are describing. I'm just an average user and don't use my computer for any dev work. After spending an hour+ with chat support w/ remote login, they couldn't figure out the problem and blamed it on some error on my Mac and told me to go to Apple support. I suspect the Parallels support technicians don't know how to fix it and are trying to buy time until they can come out with a fix.

If this is a major problem, shouldn't more people with version 12.1+ and Windows 10 experience this? Surely there must be more than a few of us. I wonder what similarities we have. This is my config:
  • OS Sierra - 10.12.3
  • 13 inch MBP late 2012 model
  • Parallels version 12.1.3
  • Windows 10 Professional - all updates up-to-date
Can others list their config? Maybe we can isolate it to something.
 
I've actually now displayed it on two machines (I have two Parallels licenses so I can switch copies of work between both).
Late 2010 iMac 27" 20GB 3TB fusion I7 2.93GHz
Late 2016 iMac 5K 27" 32GB 3TB fusion i7 4GHz

I have several VM's I use (Linux, W7 Professional 32/64, W10 Professional 32/64, Windows XP). So far it has only affected the W10 ones. I think when it first 'hit', Sierra was only on 10.12.2. Have since upgraded this to 10.12.3. No change.
When I was trying to work out what was wrong, I found a total of 79 errors listed in the event log, all related to not being able to start services.
Complete re-install of Windows did not fix it.

The same VM'S all work fine under PD11.
 
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