Parallels and VMWare aren't free either. Neither is very expensive, but still a fuckload more than I would be willing to pay to play with IE.
Anyway, the point was to run IE8 on a Mac, running it through a vm is cheating.
But I have a question about Parallels and VMWare. Will they use separate cores? Or separate processors? Do they thread? Do they "nice"? If I had a dual Xeon MacPro, would it run both OSes on separate processors?