Ouch, I figured this was just a Windows 8 host thing. Seems to coinside with the ramped up security between apps running elevated and not (although as stated before it's truly not working as expected - unable to drag from guest to desktop when NOT running elevated)
Cut & Paste has been working for me -- although it has stopped a few times but off hand I can't rememeber if I had to restart the VMWare Workstation or the guest to get it working again.
I'm no unix guy but are you running VMWare as root/sudo? That is more or less comperable to Windows 'run as admin'.
Both drag & drop and cut & paste use the guest tools so in your case that's where I would look first.
(maybe installing a quick fresh guest os & tools?)