Just now Asha was watching a video on the Mini next door, streaming it from my Mac Pro, while I was doing some work on my laptop.

Suddenly a shout of "DAD! Why's it paused? I didn't pause it!", and Lo! There was no more Harry Potter.

I wiggled the mouse so the Pro would come back to life, and as the monitor awoke the GCOD revealed itself. Bloody marvellous, I thought.

So I take the side off, reseat all the RAM modules, swap the banks over for good measure, take all the discs out and push them back in (I love the engineering on this thing), and restart.

Bang. GCOD.

So I restart again.

Bang. GCOD.

So I look up how to do a safe boot, and do one.

Blissful silence. No GCOD.

So I check the console logs, and find numerous references to "ParallelsConnectUSB".

Splock. The dropping of a penny. Moments before the scream from Asha, I'd plugged my phone in to the USB socket on the front of the Pro to charge up.

So, blame fairly and squarely at Parallels' feet, I feel.

How to uninstall? I've made a backup of the VM in case I remember there's stuff there I need, but dragging the Parallels folder into the Trash still leaves loads of droppings everywhere... like Preferences and Library. Is there a standard way to "destroy all evidence" of a program once you've fallen out of love with it?

Thank you, wonderful technical folk, for your help, all much appreciated as usual.

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