I heard back from Quicken, and they told me that "the use of VMWare Fusion and Parallels is not supported by Intuit at this time. Quicken will not be able to assist you in resolving these issues."
What a cop-out! Obviously as you can see from the image in my reply to ottermom I had not problem installing Quicken Deluxe 2013 under Windows XP SP3 and VMware Fusion 5.0.3. So I do not see this as a VMware issue. You need to validate your installation source if possible. In other words whatever you downloaded does Intuit publish an MD5 or SHA1 checksum you can validate against? If you can validate the installation source then you're starting a crippled diagnostic/troubleshooting process which makes things more difficult.
As a test I'd create a new Windows XP SP3 VM (just like I did), do not install anything, do not activate it and only try installing Quicken. The assumption here is that the fresh clean Windows Install having nothing added except to attempt to install Quicken rules out a Windows issue for this test VM. If Quicken does install okay then you'll need to determine what in the other VM is causing it to fail.