I finally got the Virtual PC upgrade edition. I did this primarily so I could move the virutal PCs from my Powerbook off to my G5 for better performance. Long-time readers will remember I have two guests: Windows 2000 and FreeBSD.
Installing Virtual PC is straightforward enough. One thing about it is that, like Office, it tries to broadcast its license key on the LAN to detect duplicates. If you don't want it to do this, just do this:
sudo ipfw add 10 drop udp from any to any 21790
This goes along with the line for Office v.X:
sudo ipfw add 11 drop udp from any to any 2222
I don't need to do any of this stuff, simply because I don't illegally copy software. Even Microsoft's.
Back to the matter at hand. Upgrading the Windows 2000 guest was actually more difficult than upgrading the FreeBSD guest. When you import the Windows 2000 guest, it starts up without a working keyboard and mouse. You just have to let it sit at the login prompt for about 10 minutes watching the disk icon blink. During this time it is making note of the hardware changes. Once you feel you've waited long enough, select 'shut down' from the PC menu, and tell it to "shut down windows 2000". This will shut down Windows the nice way, which will save the changes it made. The next time you start up, you should have control of the machine. Install the new VPC additions and everything will be fine from then on. After installing the new VPC additions, do not let Windows reboot on its own. There is some sort of bug that will get you into a BSOD loop. You need to power off the virtual machine and turn it back on. Once the new VPC additions are in, this is no longer an issue.
The only trick to FreeBSD that hasn't been discussed on this site before is the new USB support in Virtual PC. When I first tried to boot the FreeBSD guest (which I think is running 5.2.1), it hung trying to probe the USB host controllers. The fix is to go into the PC settings and disable USB support. I'll upgrade the guest to 5.3 and give it another try later on. Once it booted, I was able to start X with the exact same configuration as before.