I’ve switched from KVM to VirtualBox for my virtualisation needs. My Debian laptop is hosting and right now there is a Windows 7 guest. Apart from some slowness, especially with shared folders (on extfs3), the whole thing works like a charm. I can run XMetaL in the VirtualBox with no problems.
Finally it looks like I won’t be needing a Windows partition at work.
I’ve just set up Windows 7 as a VM with Parallels on my MacBook Pro (latest version). XMetaL 5 Author Enterprise keeps freezing on if I select too many sections in a topic and try to delete. Driving me mad!
Remember that XM5 is not necessarily Windows 7 compatible. I had some trouble running XM 5.1 and Vista, a few years back.
Have you posted about this at the XM User Forum?