Keyboard Layout in Windows 7 with VMware Fusion 5
You don't give a lot of information about where you are based so I am making some references based on experience outside the US.

When setting up a machine here in South Africa, the system (even preconfigured ones) come with an additional keyboard layout (in our case US-International). We use US keyboard layout here. That layout causes the ' to require a double tap on the keyboard before it processes it. If we remove it so that it only has one layout and restart the machine the behaves correctly.

Check that you have the correct keyboard installed in Windows as VMWare tends to make some assumptions during VM creation.