Have to say... I've been following the threads on the Parallels forums and had put off upgrading also (even though I already paid for 3.0). However, after talking to a couple of friends who upgraded with no problem I decided to pull the trigger. Made a backup of my .hdd file, uninstalled Parallels, installed 3.0, and have to say I am extremely impressed. Runs much quicker than 2.5 ever did on my MBP (running XP) and all of the new features are great! Have to say that I don't play games so can't comment about that but everything else I've tried and just the general speed make me very happy that I decided to upgrade. I'd say make a backup of your Parallels image and go for it. If something goes wrong you can always go back to 2.5.X and use the backup image.

I'm in the exact same position Kirk. Paid for 3.0, but after reading the Parallels forums for a while decided to wait a while before risking my precious 2.5 install. However your comment is tempting me into backing up and going for the upgrade...

If you do I think you'll be happy. I will say that if I were going to use it with a Boot Camp partition or if I was doing it primarily for gaming I probably would have waited. I've seen a few posts about Boot Camp partitions being messed up and that would be really bad... since I just had a pretty basic image and a good backup I figured I didn't really have anything to lose since I could always go back if I had problems. But, like I said, I had no problems at all and am very happy with the upgrade.