Fusion vs. Parallels - who is more stable?

I have a client on the NC Outer Banks that uses an Intel iMac desktop as her primary workstation. She made the switch pretty well but the company had one application that she required to run on her desktop that could only run under XP*. To make matters worse this application was used constantly as it formed the core of their hospitality business.

At first we tired to run her under Parallels - and that did work pretty well except for one ongoing and annoying flaw: the application running inside XP, and sometimes all of XP itself, would lock up requiring a soft boot of the virtual machine. This was very annoying (understandably) as she was required to get up from her desk, go to another office, get on that system, blah blah blah. And we tried everything to optimize that machine to keep it up and running and nothing worked (including software updates).

Almost out of desperation we opted to try VMware Fusion under the assumption that, heck, it is only $80.00 and it might actually be more stable. After two weeks of testing I can report back that Fusion IS more stable. My customer has had zero mystery lockups and her productivity has increased dramatically.

Granted two weeks of regular use is nowhere near long enough for a comprehensive head-to-head stability test but the VMware Fusion is ahead out of the gate and down the back stretch for sure.

* - so yeah, the application can run under Mac OS, OS 9 that is, and OS X but only if ALL desktops connecting to the server are the same OS. Ergo if you have a mixture of OS X and XP and you want all desktops to attach to the CM Server you'll either have to uproot the XP boxes or run XP on your OX machines.

On an unrelated rant there is a huge opportunity for someone to make a lot of money making a competitor to this product (and its brethren) based on open-source technology and true client-server communications. Both main products in this market charge for client licenses, and they charge a lot. Not to mention both companies have a vested interest in placing an application on the desktop of the client rather than using PHP and AJAX (or whatever) along with a true object oriented DB behind the scenes.

So, young enterprising coder, take heed and write a great app that can run on any desktop, be that desktop Mac, Microsoft, OLPC, BSD perhaps even mobile devices and PDAs. There is a lot of money on the plate just waiting for you to burst on to the scene.