Thanks alot! You seem like an expert in this area. Do you know of any good guides online for setting up the VM safely?
You provided a good list but I am not sure how to do it in VM ware.
It has been a long time since i last ran vmware player (at work, we have power partitions, at home i switched to openVZ for my virtualisation needs a long time ago), but after some quick googling around, you should be able to go to "VM > Settings, click the Options tab, and select Guest Isolation", then disable "drag and drop" and "copy and paste". To disable the network, you should probably go to your network adapters on your local machine and disable the "VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter". For the local folders: IIRC, the default options would be not to share any local folders, so if you use the default settings the folder sharing should be disabled already.
These are the things that immediately come to mind... Maybe somebody else will weigh in on this topic and give some more tips and tricks?
Good luck!