Thanks for the suggestions. I wasn't motivated enough to install Wine (I'm nearly out of space on the system drive). I did have DirectX installed on my VM, but after a bit more googling I found that there were problems in the past with VirtualBox and DirectX9.
I upgraded my copy of VirtualBox from 1.6 to 3.2.12. That has display options for 3D Acceleration and 2D Video Acceleration I enabled both of those and now it works!
I'm not sure which of these three things was the critical step. But its nice to see Abe back again.