I love Parallels on my MacBook Pro and Coherence is very cool, albeit a bit quirky. Last night after Windows Update ran I was unable to successfully boot my WinXP image. Turns out a lot of others have had similar problems and an excellent solution can be found on the Parallels Forums. The problem entails from rebooting Parallels Desktop (build 3036 Beta) while in coherence mode with an external monitor connected. Upon reboot, I received the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death)
with the error: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. The solution is to set the screen resolution to what it was prior to the reboot. I was able to do this by:

1. Boot in safe mode
2. Uninstall Parallel Tools
3. Reboot
4. Change to the correct resolution (for me this was 1920×1200)
5. Re-install Parallel Tools

Another solution is to change the resolution after booting in VGA mode, although I did not test this; see the Parallels Forum thread for details.

If there is a problem uninstalling Parallel Tools, remove the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce\ParallelTools (or something similar to ParallelTools) and try again. You can also boot in Last Known Good Configration and uninstall.

Thanks to Mike Mulligan for his solution.

UPDATE: New Beta 3094 now available!

I love my new MacBook Pro, but when I have it detached from my home network I often get application lock ups or long pauses while using it offline. I found a repeatable pattern: when selecting File–>Open from many (most) applications, often for the first time, the MBP would pause and then display a dialog stating AFP Connection Status … Looking up “<hostname>.” Clicking on the solo “Cancel” button tends to solve the problem, but the delay is hugely annoying.

It turns out the problem is due to an alias from my offline MBP to a folder on one of my networked Macs; specifically, the Pictures folder is aliased to one computer on my network that holds my pictures so I can access them from all machines. As soon as I remove or rename the alias (to something like Pictures2) I no longer receive the AFP Connection Status window. As soon as I rename it back to Pictures, the AFP Connection Status dialog appears.