VM already in use error?

Last night I installed Parallels, and then Win XP Pro on my MacBook Pro. Had the "Automatic updates" for Windows set to update at 3AM. In WinXP, I set turned off the screen saver, and set the hard drive and monitor to never turn off (didn't know if these would cause problems or not). When I got up this morning, the Win XP machine was locked up hard. Couldnt even click on the Start button. Even the red "power off virtual machine" button in Parallels didn't kill it. I had to force quit parallels...

Now, when I try to run Windows, Parallels gives the error "WindowsXP.pvs file is already in use by another instance of Parallels. Do you want to override the lock and open anyway?"

I rebooted OS X but that didn't help.

Any ideas?

 

Tell it yes (as long as you are sure no other VM is running). It sets a lock when a VM starts and clears it during normal shutdown. You can override it safely under those circumstances.