Confirmed it this afternoon while trying to help my mother via iChat Screen Sharing. With Parallels open, Screen Sharing kept crashing and the error reporting dialog box came up every time. iChat would still run. Every further attempt caused the same effect: Screen Sharing crashed.

With Parallels closed, Screen Sharing worked great. As soon as Parallels was started, Screen Sharing would freeze and she would have trouble controlling the mouse. I had her do a Force Quit of Parallels, and that made Screen Sharing work again.

She’s using the latest version of Parallels Desktop for the Mac — I know because I installed it just last weekend. We’re both on Leopard 10.5.2 running on iMac computers. I have a 20″ iMac G5 and she has the latest 24″ iMac Dual Core.

The Leopard OS has been available to developers since the 2007 WWDC. One would think Parallels had enough time in almost a year to get this bug resolved, but I guess not.

Updated 3/4/08: It looks like Parallels isn’t the root cause for the iChat Screen Sharing crashes. The more I use both of them together, the more I realize iChat Screen Sharing itself is to blame.  It’s still buggy and unstable, and tends to crash when you least expect it. That particular day, it tended to crash when Parallels was open. The next day, it crashed whenever it wanted, and as soon as I connected. I’d get an error message that said “Unable to communicate for the last 10 seconds” after each crash. I’d get to see the remote screen for a second or two, then boom, Screen Sharing crashed.

Even iChat itself crashed twice during Screen Sharing yesterday evening. It’s terribly frustrating to try and help someone remotely and have the mouse jump around on their screen, move erratically or not at all, experience terrible fuzziness on dialog boxes, to the point where you can’t tell what button to press or what you just typed into a field, and finally to have Screen Sharing or even iChat crash altogether.  Apple hasn’t really done their homework on this. They need to get on the ball and fix all these problems.

I noticed that there’s a greater chance Screen Sharing won’t crash if an iChat video chat is started first. When Screen Sharing is started, the video chat ends, naturally, though a voice chat can still be conducted, and Screen Sharing tends not to crash after that, though one will still experience the problems I listed in the paragraph above at some point or other, including a possible crash of iChat altogether.

If Screen Sharing is started by itself by right-clicking on a contact in iChat and asking to see their screen (or vice-versa), it tends to crash more often, and most likely right away after it’s started.

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