Crashes on Mac side when running Win7 64 bit in bootcamp as VM in Parallels

Question

I got my MacBookPro mid April 2010. Microsoft store partitioned & set up bootcamp with Win7 64 bit. I then Purchased Parallels 5 & set it up using the bootcamp partition as the Virtual machine. Not knowing what I was doing at 1st, I accidentally created a 2nd VM the 1st time I tried to use it & didn't know how to get rid of it until a couple weeks ago.
It was all working pretty well until about Feb 19 when I was at the office trying to take notes in Pages. I had just started when it started alternating between Pages, desktop & blue screen then pages quit. Same when I reopened pages so just shut down & an hr or so later was ok. Over a period of about a wk rapidly increasing # of crashes of Safari & Pages to where it was becoming hard to use. Went to Genius bar who told me to do archive & install after back up. Had to go research & buy back up HD & before I could back up it got so bad it wouldn't even boot. Apple care helped me do Archive & install over the phone. Much better but still problems. Fri he checked back & had me reset Safari & empty Safari & other caches. Then Parallels crashed. So shut down & booted into bootcamp. It was also messed up.
Then remembered the old, if all else fails trick of shutting it down & leaving it for a bit to clear out the volatile memory. Came back & booted into bootcamp & opened Outlook etc. Ok. Then booted into Mac & then parallels & it was ok.
But problems continued. Repaired preferences, etc. I also found out that i didn't have the latest build of Parallels 5 (from the Parallels user forums) even though the update process said I did. They seemed rather techie. I finally did figure out how to download & install the latest build of Parallels. Not sure if that helped or why the check update from the pull down menu acted like it was checking & then told me I had the latest one but mine was several builds older than the current 1.
Along the way, I finally learned how to delete the duplicate VM & it worked better for awhile, but then was getting bad. I verified the disk in Disk utility & it stopped almost immediately & said it needed to be repaired. Genius bar did that.Erase & install was mentioned. then more crashes, more problems so again verified disk & it ran longer but again stopped & said repair needed. Went into Genius bar on 3-25 for erase & install. Got it back next day but I think maybe the genius (who I had asked to help set up bootcamp partition) restored more than just the users which is what the head genius had said was the only thing to restore. Not sure, but it appears my new settings are showing. & it appears that whatever was corrupted may have been restored as well, not sure. Made another appt for genius bar to help get things right.
The tests that were run showed that the hardware was ok. Several people told me while this was going on that it was likely related to running Windows on a mac & especially as a VM, & then someone or 2 also mentioned that running in coherence mode could be an issue.
This whole thing has been very frustrating & isn't what I expected after coming back to mac, but still needing to run windows for business software. My old macs never had problems. My brother said his macs are reliable & don't have problems.
When it got so that I couldn't even boot on the mac side the 1st time, I was able to boot into bootcamp & had to do drag & drop backup of mac files to my windows external HD. But before & after that when Safari was crashing so much it wasn't very useful, I did better in IE running in Parallels.
What I'm wondering is what might have caused this & more specifically, what can I do to avoid it happening again? A major reason that I use Parallels all the time is that I sync a windows mobile 6,5 phone with Outlook so its not very convenient to have to boot into bootcamp to check email.
The fingers have been pointed at maybe the partition getting messed up but no real answers so far. So while I assume we will get it working ok again, I'm afraid the same thing could happen again. It was suggested that it may have been doing little things kind of behind the scenes where it was getting corrupted a little bit by little bit which didn't show up until the rapidly cascading events that lead to the erase & install. So I don't know if that was the case or if something happened around Feb 19 when I first really noticed the problems (although there may have been some unexpected quits before then, but not bad or repeated). Sorry this is so long.

Answer 1

Chris,
Thanks for the info/suggestions. I had already done the "clean install" without knowing it. I also had uninstalled Firefox and Chrome and was looking at dumping Safari, but I found the culprit file "_Flash Player.plugin" (version10.2.151.49) on a search for "Flash Player" under Spotlight.
Strange thing was the file did not appear when just browsing through the various directories or searching with finder. Removed it and all is good.
Mike