Can't tell why the installer screen was too large - it may have happened to me quite awhile ago but I was always either able to hide the toolbar or or move the screen up so the continue button was available. Like I said Virtualbox was completely normal so it didn't seem to be an issue with my hardware. There is occasionally some difficulty in deciding whether a particular problem is do to the guest OS or is a bug in VMware. For me this is one of those instances.
I came across another OS (Debian clone) called ZevenOS Neptune which has a 3.10 kernel and is more interesting. VMware Tools compiled except for the HGFS modules but I need to check whether they worked after a reboot (the /mnt/hgfs directory was created anyway).
I am glad you had the opportunity to check keyboard only installations. I've only needed it for Debian or an Ubuntu Server installation - no problems like you describe at all.