Read this before attempting PD 4.0 upgrade

Thought I'd start a thread to which we can post advice about upgrading to PD 4.0.

Here's my contribution.

1. BEFORE upgrading a Windows VM from 3.0 to 4.0, logon to your VM and enable autologon into an administrator account. As far as I can tell, the PD 4.0 upgrade depends on autologon. It fails if a userid/password is required to logon.

Here are Microsoft Knowledge Base articles describing how to enable autologon.

2. If you do not want to enable autologon, then be prepared to "butt in" on the supposedly automatic upgrade progress. After you initiate the upgrade to 4.0, you can wait a couple hours for the failure message to appear, which then suggests you use the completely unhelpful trainwreck that Parallels calls a "troubleshooter"...

...Or you can take matters into your own hands by using the "magic" key combo Control+Command+Option+R, which was posted in an earlier message by moderator john@parallels.

3. Once you use Control+Command+Option+R to rid of the annoying anti-progress screen, you'll be able to interact with your Windows VM. Hit Cancel on all the New Hardware Found dialogs that you'll soon see, and don't bother doing the Windows Activation until you're done with the Parallels Tools installation.

4. After canceling all the New Hardware dialogs and the Activation wizard, restart Windows. After the restart, logon as you normally do (or turn off Autologon if you enabled it specifically for the PD 4.0 upgrade), and you should be good to go.