Yes, I looked at Parallels. It's absolutely great if your need is for concurrent operation of different OS's. You can have your Windows in a Window while in OSX. However, you take a speed hit so that you shouldn't count on this solution if processor speed is paramount for the "secondary" OS. 

However, I had not thought of the advantage of using Parallels as a means to access the Mac-based files and that may be reason enough for me to buy it since it's pretty cheap.

You also can find some good discussion regarding the performance issues involving Parallels at the CGTalk.com forum.

Mark