So turning off the 3D acceleration feature in VMWare makes it completely slow as hell to run to the point of nearly being pointless to use, so i kept it on as normal. I was able to actually do the actual coding work on C2 in the meantime while doing the layout stuff on my PC at home. However, an interesting thing happened when I ran this older WinXP app which causes the VM to hang for a bit (i'm currently running Windows 10 on the VM). When i was able to un-hang it (had to send a ctrl-alt-delete to close it out using task manager), i then noticed the layout view in C2 was visible and usable again!!! Not sure what weird graphic glitches fixed it, but cool...at least i gotta way to continue working in VMWare until Construct 3 arrives...