HTPC with mint and virtual box for XBMC

I have a HTPC with an i3 and 8gb of ram, It is running Linux Mint 13 with XBMC and has been running about a couple years this way. However it is starting to act up at times and not load everything properly upon boot (advancedsettings.xml will not be loaded and I use a wiimote for remote, when this happens I reboot til it loads). This is becoming annoying and am wanting to redo this so I can create a Skype box also. To do this I am going to take the box out from behind the TV into the office and work on it. Its alright but not ideal. So this is what I was thinking, but didnt know what better ideas were out there.

Run the latest Linux Mint, and install VirtualBox. I would create a virtual XBMC machine and use this as my main media center. This way if something didnt work or I needed to change things around I could create a virtual disk on my main computer and then just transfer the image to the HTPC and have virtual box load the new image. This way I dont need to take the HTPC down everytime I need to do this work to it. Is this a horrible idea? If so what does everybody else do?

The HTPC is nothing more then a client that loads all content from a server running in the other room. Upon build I just drop advancedsettings.xml into the userdata folder and reboot. It loads everything from the server after that.

Please give me your input on this, thanks!

why not load Openelec instead of Mint then XBMC

So you would basicly connect the HTPC to the TV, and run the VM in fullscreen?

I´m not that familiar working with VB, but running HD AV outputs through an VM is something I would never recommend. FPS drops, probably no GPU acceleration, and I would assume problems playing surround/HD audio.

You might want to read through this - http://askubuntu.com/questions/2029...n-ubuntu-12-10-running-as-guest-in-virtualbox