Win 7 Guest OS "suspend" crashes Host OS X 10.6.6

I've been running 10.6.6 and the latest Parallels build for weeks w/o any issues on my 4-core Mac Pro.

However, last week I installed a series of windows updates on the guest OS (Win7) and now every time I suspend the guest OS, or shut down the guest OS, or quit parallels, it locks up the entire machine. I'm left with a cursor in Mac OS but am unable to click on anything and machine does not respond to keyboard commands. Issue does NOT resolve itself and I am forced to hard boot the host machine. Guest OS always pulls up the safe mode/regular mode selection screen after the reboot.

I'm assuming this was the Win7 SP1 update that I installed last week, not really sure, but this is REALLY FRUSTRATING since I can't log out or shut down the host w/o locking it up (since the first thing that happens is Parallels suspend).

After reading through the other threads I see here, this doesn't appear to be the same issue that others are having re: guest OS start up.

Would this be considered a Kernel Panic?