Well said, PrzemekB! I've just had responded with furies reply last night to the support staff in my ticket.
It's unbelievable and truly a shame that Parallels are suggesting (or actually telling) customers to upgrade to version 19 which isn't free, only to get rid of this unreasonable bug of theirs between version 18 and the recent Mac OS Sonoma - version 18 is still in its service life for God's sake!
It really feels like Parallels found a way to make the one-time-purchase product of theirs into a subscription plan one, without using the subscription word in it. They just take the customers' feedback and fix the issues in a newer version, leaving the previous version intact instead fixing the bugs in it as well, and then telling customers that if they want a version without these bugs that they'll need to upgrade. I'm really speechless about this.
Honestly Parallels, it seems like you don't get that a new version of anything mainly means a version with NEW features, not bug fixes which should be taken care of in the version users report about. We don't ask for any of the new features - we only expect that you'd take this fix big from version 19 and apply it to version 18 so we could keep working as we had so far. And you know what? Fine, let's say that you really "can't" fix this matter in versino 18 from any odd reason - the least you could do is say that you're very sorry for this experience and to provide your 18 release customers with a free upgrade key to version 19, so they could put this bug behind them and keep working on their work.
I for one am NOT going to pay a dime for any of your products, until this matter is solved for me and for the rest of us here.