Re: Permission to send through OWA
I believe this is a known issue, do you mind trying creating a regular test account that is not an Admin and trying to get/recieve mail through OWA? Also, is Outlook working and is it just OWA?
Re: System Manager not working
Are you using the shortcut from start->programs to open ESM? It may be possible that the shortcut was not properly configured. One simple technique to try out is by navigating to exchange serverbin and directly clicking on the Exchange MSC file.
In general there seems to be some timeout issues happening during installation in the VM environment that is causing some items not to complete succesfully (mailbox database creation for example). One way to tell what is going on is by looking at Exchange ServerLoggingSetupLogs and looking at setup.log.