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Sossity

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 12, 2010
1,360
32
I am not sure where the best place to post this is as I am not sure what caused the problem, whether it was parallels, windows, mac os or something else.

I was running parallels desktop 7.0 with windows xp, am using a mid 2010 macbook pro with snow leopard 10.6.8.

while I was in parallels, I wanted to look up something in finder, & launch spaces to open up one of my other active windows.

when I tired to click the finder icon, it would not open, the little blue glowing dot that normally shows below an app when I launch an app did not come up.

I then tried to click spaces to see/toggle to another one of my active windows, for finder & then Firefox, but nothing, when spaces launched, when I hovered my mouse over to highlight a window, it did not get the blue outline so I could click it.

I shut down windows & parallels, then disconnected my external hard drive, & then rebooted my mac. I also ran a repair disk permissions on my mac, (there was a very long list of results for this). After all this, my mac was back to normal, & seemed to run a bit more quickly, & I could open apps, & finder again.

I then opened parallels, & opened my virtual machine windows again. When it opened up, Adobe flash player popped up for me to install an update. I did this & all was ok.

Did the flash player update on my virtual machine windows cause finder my mac apps to freeze & not launch? I know sometimes update pop ups can do this.
 
Sounds like exhaustion of something. If you can get either Activity Monitor to run, or Terminal and type 'top', you might be able to see what's hogging resources. Not using Parallels gives me no context for your issues other than to check resource usage.
 
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