Recently, I installed Parallels 6 on my mac so I could run OneNote. (Why won’t you release a native port already, Microsoft?? It runs pretty well — in fact, with “Coherence” mode I can even make Windows apps run as if they were real Mac apps, complete with a Dock icon, drop shadows, and Exposé support!

However, there was one visual thing that constantly bothered me: every dock icon had what appeared to be a red pause icon. After some internet searching, I found that it was, in fact, not a pause icon at all, but the Parallels logo!

Luckily, it turns out to be pretty easy to remove!

1. First: In “Configure…” under the “Virtual Machine” menu, go to your virtual machine options, and disable “share windows applications with mac”.
2. Quit Parallels
3. Open Finder, and navigate to the Applications folder on your hard drive.
4. Find the Parallels Desktop icon, right click, and select “Show package contents”
5. Once there, under the Contents/Resources folder, select the following files:
   • SharedAppDocumentIcon.icns
   • SharedAppIconMask_128.png
   • SharedAppIconOverlay.icns
6. Move those files to somewhere as a backup.
7. Now, download this set of replacement icons that I’ve created.
8. Unzip those files and copy them to that Contents/Resources from before.
9. Finally, start Parallels again, go back to the virtual machine configuration, and re-enable the “share windows applications with mac” checkbox.

And congratulations! You’ve just removed Parallels’s horrifying abomination of a logo from your Windows programs and file associations. The best part is, they probably paid a graphic design firm thousands of dollars for that logo!

But enough rambling — go enjoy running Windows programs on your mac!