In case anyone's wondering, I did try using Wine, but that was even worse, I'd get weird screen update problems, things would go black, etc. Libre/Open Office wasn't an option either, the client was 100% MS including Project, and compatibility was (and is) a serious issue.
When moving the VM to a server, the raw performance issues went away, but network lag became a pretty serious obstacle when using the GUI. In the end, I ended up just SSHing into the VM, and mounting part of its filesystem using Samba.
(And assuming that I had been able to get a working graphical environment, it's still a very low standard of "working." There are dozens of little annoyances when you're nesting a completely separate window manager inside your current window manager.)
You need decent hardware, I've got a beefy i7 laptop with lots of DRAM and will be adding an additional SSD. You can do better with tower or remoting elsewhere, but it's nice to have the whole environment along sometimes.