Finally have Parallels working again
After an extensive amount of work, I finally have Parallels working again the way I want it to. One shared hard disk image for both my work and personal accounts on my mac, so I can use the same Windows install for both. The more recent builds of Parallels have change things a bit; they both now store the pvs files in the user accounts /Library folder; earlier builds of parallels could share a pvs file in /Users/Shared. Now I have the hard disk image in /Users/Shared, and separate .pvs files (virtual machine definitions) in each user account.
I also struggled with updating a copy of Windows from May 07 (my last good backup before the Windows config got hosed). Windows Update via the web browser just ran my CPU utilization up to > 100% forever without appearing to make progress. I restarted Windows, and set the windows update automatic timer to noon (so it would run while the machine was up). This worked, when I shut it down in the afternoon, it had 19(!) updates to install before shutdown completed. Hopefully that was all of them...
It appears that Parallels finally fixed shared networking to work properly. When I use it at work, I have a wireless network connection that requires a VPN to access the corporate network, and a wired Ethernet connection that does not. Earlier parallels builds insisted on using the wireless connection, and therefore being unable to resolve names on the network. This current build seems to correctly figure out that I have two connetions, and that it should try to resolve names on both before giving up.
Now that I'm done with Windows Update, it does seem that the VM is less of a hog; I don't notice as much that it is up and running in the background.