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Installed and ran fine for a week. When I booted the host today, Mint VM performance is degraded to the point it laggs about 20 seconds per key stroke in terminal or mouse click anywhere.

Built from: linuxmint-18.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso acquired through linuxmint-18.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso.torrent installed on VirtuialBox created from VirtualBox-5.2.0-118431-Win.exe and Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.0-118431.vbox-extpack from Oracle.

Removed stock/installed GuestAdditions due to rendering mode problem and installed VBoxLinuxAdditions.run out of VBoxGuestAdditions_5.1.30.iso because _5.2.1-118018 or _5.2.1-118447 or _5.2.1-118918 does not work with Mint 18.2.

Host is a i7 Win10 with 16Gb ram. V-mint is 8Gb ram, 4 processors, 256MB Video memory with acceleration ON, 240GB .vdi disk. Mint is updated with 0 broken packages and 0 pending updates. Synaptic manager has recommended packages as dependencies ON. V-mint ran solid for about a week rebooting through many cycles. Host machine is OK. VirtualBox is fast and responsive. Tried several refresh & reboot of lvm / vm / host with no effect. Have not found any similar discussions online. Pics depict Mint configuration for additional information.
Did trial expire? (kidding)

Installed on Vbox to evaluate against Ubnutu 17.10 VM as a dedicated Drupal development sandbox. Part of the specifications is to run on a VM so that it may be containerized in Docker or ideally DockSal. Mint was clearly emerging as the winner until it developed an acute case of arthritis while the host was shutdown overnight. Could possibly drop the container specs if it ran reliably and consistently.

[Resolution / Solution] Sort of... Now running Mint 18.2 in VMware Workstation 14. First tried dropping back to VBox 5.1.30 with no difference. Though some different challenges to overcome with Mint / VMware with Win10 host. This was a much better solution for me. Continue to run Debian 9.2.1 with MATE disktop in Vbox 5.2. Mint with Cinnamon would probably be OK on a machine by its self, or a dual-boot. Not a option for me as I need both Win/Linux platforms running concurrently. As for performance Debian continues to smoke Mint hands down as servers and sites are added equally to each! But to be fair I'm looking at Linux distros for sandbox Drupal commerce website development NOT for a complete everyday single environment. I know many will cringe and as much as I hate to say, straight Win continues to be much more straight forward for tuning and managing various servers along with closer access to graphic tools, video editors, and such. Using concurrent systems I can just dump the assets into a shared directory for import into Linux. I find that I am actually doing the build work in Win because it is fast and convenient and then just recreating a mirror Linux site. When in Win and need bash on something, babun works great.

Another interesting point about the VMware solution: When setting up virtual Mint I gave it 8GB memory and was able to set aside 2GB of that for the GPU. With Vbox I never found a way to go beyond 512MB.

The 18.3 Mint distro looks interesting and will upgrade when out of beta. Have not tried Arch or Antergos yet. Did not really care for Ubuntu 17.10 and believe Mint will replace Ubuntu as the WordPress of popular Linux distros. Only complaint about Debian is its anal security. Don't want that for a sandbox development environment. You can scrape a lot of that crap off and then build out the sys for your specific needs. Some of what you would probably take for granted is not there, so you pick and choose with out doubling up or removing other unwanted packages.