greetings- the situation: host machine: MBP 1.8Ghz dual-core w/ 2 gig ram, 80gig HD, OS 10.4.6 updated today*. VM: parallels 2.1 beta 6/build 1812.7, using 8Gb "partition" & slightly less than 1Gb memory. guest o/s windows 2000 pro. not sure of build or SP level.... running sony vegas5. I have already discovered that vegas doesn't like reaching out for content to a USB hard drive, especially if the content is AVI or other high bitrate stuff. it works better if I copy the files to the w2k desktop. this is a drag because then I use twice as much disc space for projects I'm sharing across w2k & OSX apps (e.g. I want to do some fancy audio process on some AIFFs in vegas, but the rest of the movie is fine where it is in imovieHD). but even if these files are in the shared folder on the mac's own drive, it causes the VM to lock up. I had spin control running last time, & got all sorts of errors. the VM was refusing to let me see the mac desktop so I could send it a ctrl-alt-del from the console window. I can go into (a great deal) more detail if anyone's interested.... I am tempted to experiment with running a virtual network between the two OSs & see if I fare any better. has anyone tried this with big files? I'm talking about 2-3Gb of data.... *today, my MBP decided that it wanted to talk to the mothership & grab itself some updates. these included apple's equivalent of a service-pack, some firmware stuff & some other bits & pieces that I wish I'd paid more attention to now. & I thought I could trust apple.... serves me right for stuffing that rj45 in the side.... upon launching parallels just now, I discovered that it still knows there's a w2k guest lurking in the shadows, but it doesn't know how much ram to lend it, or what folders to share with it. had to rebuild the VM config from scratch. damn. this happen to anyone else? d.