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I have also had success running rviz inside of a VM. In my case, the VM is VirtualBox running under a Windows 7 x64 host. I had issues getting the HW-accelerated video to run smoothly, so ended up forcing software-rendering as described here. This has worked great for coding jobs with relatively modest visualization needs. I would worry somewhat if you ended up showing a lot of rviz data (as might be the case with PointCloud2 data).

However, my setup did not work well with the Kinect. I didn't dig too deeply, but I don't think the USB data was properly passed from the Windows environment into the VM. It may be worth using lower-level tools (rostopic hz /camera/points, rosrun image_view ..., etc.) to see if your issues are related to rviz or the openni nodes.