I've just upgraded from VMware Fusion 3 to the latest 4.0 release since I'm running Lion and the company says it's a lot faster, but now it's complaining that Windows 7 is out of date and needs to be updated? What's going on and how do I fix it?

This is a guest article, written by Tim Beyers.

Rarely do I need access to Windows programs. For the times when I do, I've switched from a Parallels virtual machine running XP to CodeWeavers' CrossOver for Mac, a virtual environment that simulates the Win32 API, one program at a time.

What CrossOver for Mac is

CrossOver is built on the open source Wine project, which proposes to re-implement the Windows architecture for Unix. Thus, systems that draw from a Unix kernel -- Mac OS X and Linux, notably -- can use Wine to run Windows programs as if they were native to the underlying architecture.

I have no idea what happened, but I had Microsoft Windows XP running just fine within the VMWare Fusion application, as you documented (see installing Vista in VMWare Fusion) and now it crashes without an error when I try to run it. Help! I need to get this working!

I know you've written rather extensively about Parallels as a virtual machine environment for Mac OS X, but I'm wondering what you think of VMware Fusion and whether you know if it works properly with Microsoft Vista?

Kind of a strange query, but I run Parallels extensively and often find that I need to email data files I've created therein -- within Windows XP -- to my colleagues. I don't want to have any mail program running in WinXP, however, I want to just use Apple Mail. Is there an EASY way to do this?

I've been running with Parallels for a while on my new Mac Intel system, and am really happy with it. But I really wish I could cut and paste between the Windows apps and the Mac apps, wish it would sync to the correct time, and so on. Is there some sort of Parallels equivalent to the old VMware "helper apps" that you'd install within the guest operating system? I'm running Windows XP.