I just setup a new VM using a Windows 2008 R2 server to do some SharePoint 2010 development. To really get started I switched my VM to fill-screen-mode, in order to get more desk-space.

But that just gave me a blank, black screen. Resizing the window works perfectly fine, but not full-screen. Even manually triggering the “fit client” event didn’t do anything good.

The solution was trivial (as usual with this kind of errors): you have to enable 3D acceleration in the VM settings. What a bummer.