Parallels nearly stalls Mac for ~5min when launched

[Makosuke]

I tried Google and the forum search, and neither came up with any suggestions, so hopefully this isn't a stupid question.

Basically, whenever I launch Parallels, it slows my MBP to the point that it is totally unusable for 5-10 minutes. It's not completely frozen--the UI will respond to clicks after maybe 5-10 seconds--and after whatever is happening finishes, everything is completely back to normal and Parallels pops open. Also, this is BEFORE launching Windows; it's when I launch Parallels itself, and before the Parallels OS select window appears.

Activity Monitor shows about 100% CPU load for the process, but there's still spare CPU available on the other core, and it's not thrashing due to low RAM--the hard drive doesn't appear to be doing much if anything. 2GB of RAM in the MBP, Parallels reserving about 500MB for itself, and there's free RAM available before, during, and after.

It didn't do this in the past (I'm thinking it may have started at some point after I upgraded to Leopard, but not sure), it's totally repeatable on my system, and it will happen even immediately after a MacOS restart.

Is this a known problem? Any suggestions?


I basically just use Windows for browser testing, but this is so annoying I'm seriously considering ditching Parallels entirely and switching to Fusion, but I'd rather not buy more software, and I figured I should give Parallels a shot before I start telling all my clients to buy Fusion instead of Parallels.