Disable the 3D effects (do you really need them?). VirtualBox does provide some degree of 3D emulation (which needs to be explicitly enabled when you configure the VM). However, do not expect this to work as well if it were running natively. You could also try one of the other VM platforms such as VMWare, Parallels (on Mac) or KVM (if you're running Linux-under-Linux).
Also I noticed Mint was rather sluggish to get to the graphical interface on boot.. Updating to the latest packages alleviated somewhat the problem, but it still takes quite some time to get a responsive main menu. Ah well, I'm sticking with LXDE for now !