I never experienced any difficulties with any of the the vm images. I used the "pkgng" packaging system for 99% of the software I installed, and built a couple of things from ports.
In my tests I was evaluating FreeBSD 10.0 as a developer's workstation. Chromium, Firefox, vim, git, VLC, ruby, gem, rake, etc - everything installed painlessly and worked as expected.
BTW, my preferred desktop environment is now XFCE (1) plus slim (2). I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I realized that I don't use 90% of what KDE gives me. Speaking for myself, XFCE does everything I need.
(1) http://www.xfce.org (2) http://daemon-notes.com/articles/desktop/slim