Long story short:
- Changing the OS selection to Windows 8.1 in Vbox solved the issue.
Short story long:
I'd been running it as "Other Windows (64-bit)" (w/2012 Std) for quite some time w/out issue
Decided to upgrade to R2 from Standard. Fired off upgrade but had to walk away. Came back to guru meditation.
Searched forums, found people trying quite a variety of things, looks like users had the same problem w/8.1.
I was lucky as I found quite a few people spending hours on this.
I would've posted in any of the older threads I'd found but they are all locked.
Figured I'd create this one real quick just in case some one else runs into this too.