With Ubuntu 12.04 in VMWare, the first issue I noticed was that I was unable to grab the edge of a window to resize the window, except from the top. I eventually got fed up with having to press Alt+F8 to grab the window and resize, so I started investigating the issue. After a good amount of searching (apparently quite a few people had the same issue), I came to the conclusion that the edge of the window was just too thin to grab. This is relatively easy to fix with modifying a few files.
Solution -
1. Figure out which theme you are using (mine is the Radiance theme).
sudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Radiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml
2. Find the line in the file that says:
frame_geometry name="frame_geometry_normal"
Inside this xml tag, change left_width, right_width, and bottom_height from value="1" to value="3".
You need to reboot to see the changes, but this worked for me to make the border wider and fixed the resizing problem.
-- suntzu_II