There is a nasty problem with uising the help in Parallels Workstation. For some reason the application, instead of either using the "open" routines for HTML files fires up a new Safari application instance. This is annoying in most cases but when using third-party Safari plug-ins it can lead to very NASTY consequences. In my case I have quite a few plug-ins and I'm trying to isolate the actual combination but I suspect Saft. What happened is that when I opened the help page through the PW menu item a new Safar instance and Saft told me it thought Safari had crashed, but in reality was running already. I copied the URL and closed that safari instance to go to the one I had already opened. Later yesterday I closed Safari and when I tried to open it again it wouldn't open. After some basic investigation I noticed Safari was an empty .app folder. No contents in the application at all. I had to recover from a backup to have a functional Safari going again, as it can't be easily downloaded or re-updated. Parallels should either have a webkit minibrowser in PW or use the normal "open URL" function of MacOSX to use the default browser (the same that the "open" command in the terminal does)
I vote for the default browser - I use firefox (well, deerpark on the Mac) and would like that to open instead of Safari! D