I have a new mac pro and 10gb ram. I installed a trail version of parallels exclusivley so that i could use mc for my music and photos without rebooting to windows all the time. But it hasn't worked well for me. It installed perfectly with no special effort required from me. It uses my existing bootcamp version of windows, and does everything as it should (connects to the interent fine etc.) but when i load MC and play a song, the song keeps cutting out, like it's buffering or something. Also the MC window frequently seizes up and it's minutes before I can click inside it again. Video doesn't play back at all (MC just freezes again).
However using the standard windows media player, music plays back ok. Videos only playback sound though. No picture.
I have none of these issues when using MC after booting into windows from bootcamp.
My parallels trail ends this week, and though I've scoured their forums, I can't find any useful advice that could fix it for me, so I guess I'm back to using bootcamp again.
For when I absolutely need to hear music on the mac, I have taken to using Songbird. It's ok, but still has a long way to go. It works better than itunes for me.