The resizing worked, after playing around with the preferences outside the vm, now the greeter is displayed with the correct resolution.
The scrolling sluggishness remains, even though i have set it to only use 2 cpu cores out of 4.
Drag and drop and copy paste from host to guest still doesn't work. Seems like vm-ware-tools is not started, and i cant find any clear official documentation how to start up the tools manually.