Problems with accessing shared folders

Hi,

I've been getting a series of problems, getting progressively worse, in using shared folders, when running a WinXP virtual machine under Gentoo Linux.

One of the programs I run in the VM (Modelsim) generates large files, so I direct it to store those files on the shared drive (i.e. in a directory on the host machine). Initially I ran into problems when the file size exceeded 4Gb (see my earlier post), but I got round that by running the program in such a way as to keep these files smaller.

The program worked fine for a few days. Then it suddenly refused to access the shared drive. It would crash (without any error messages) as soon as it tried to access anything in the shared drive. I could see the files in Windows Explorer, but Modelsim refused to touch them.

As an experiment, I started a Samba server on the host machine, and accessed the files on the VM by accessing the appropriate folder as a network drive. This worked well, although a bit slowly, for a short time. The files I needed were visible to Windows, and Modelsim was able to access them without any trouble. Then, after a few days, accesses to the network drive from the VM suddenly became extremely slow (e.g. about 10 minutes to read a 1Mb file). I had not changed any settings, in Windows or Linux, which could account for the slowdown.

I tried re-installing Parallels (both rev 2072 and rev 2092) and I also restored the Windows image file from a backup copy. None of this helped. I've now got a VM that is virtually unusable. Does anyone have any idea where the problem is, and how to fix it?

Thanks
Clive Harris