I've completely given up on virtuemart - anything that takes this much effort to get going is not worth it. I've used Joomla for about 4 years now so am in the intermediate level of understanding. There should not be this many bugs with something that comes so highly rated. Sorry, but I throw my hands up in the air and will be looking elsewhere.
Best Regards.
In case you were trying to use VM2 on Dreamhost, did you ever check if your server meets the minimum requirements PHP 5.2 or 5.3
and MySQL 5? AFAIK they do operate some older ones.
Personally, I don't have any of your 'bugs' on my installations, so there is a possibility your problems are outside of VM2.