I finally got the Mac Pro fully installed. Using the migration utility on a Time Machine backup screwed up the mailboxes in Mail somehow, so I had to hook up the old iMac as a firewire target and copy it all over again. Then it worked.
Some apps needed re-licensing, especially Adobe is a mother when it comes to this. You need to de-activate the old installation before you can activate on a new machine. Max two activated machines per serial number. I can’t imagine what you would have to go through if the old machine isn’t bootable so you can de-activate from it. Moral of the story: don’t ever reformat the old machine before you’ve excercised all your apps thoroughly.
Some other apps needed a new license entry, but none of the others needed deactivating on the original machine. Zinio reader was its usual obnoxious self, needing all kinds of manual removals of files in library and plists and stuff, plus reinstallation. This is about the fifth or tenth time I’m doing this with Zinio, and they really ought to get their act together.
Parallels needed a little fiddling to get the “shared networking” working. The trick is to go into system preferences, networking, and the system automatically wants to activate en3, which is what is missing if you migrate Parallels from another machine. Problem solved.
As a first test, I started up three instances of Windows, and had one of them compile a hefty DLL using Borland C++. At the same time, the other instances remained totally responsive, while OSX itself didn’t slow down in the least. Everything remained snappy as can be. Took a shot of the screen estate with the CPU graphs (8 of them stacked…) on top of the left Windows XP. You can admire the screenshot here. The current version of Parallels isn’t able to use or emulate more than one CPU per instance, but I think they will provide for that later. Let’s hope.