I don't have any experience with VMWare, and only a little with Windows systems, but it sounds like your problem has to do with PostgreSQL, rather than anything else.
In particular: Did you start PostgreSQL in networked mode? By default, PostgreSQL only listens on Unix sockets. (This tends to surprise a lot of people.)
Check the postgresql.conf configuration file. There should be a line there marked "tcpip_socket". Uncomment the line and set it to "true", then restart PostgreSQL.
You'll probably need to modify pg_hba.conf as well. Once you've turned on the TCP/IP socket, pg_hba.conf indicates which IP addresses (or networks) may connect to your server, and which authentication method you'll use with each of them.
An easy way to test all of this is with the psql command-line tool. If you can say "psql mydb" to connect to your database, but "psql -h localhost mydb" results in a "connection refused" error, then you probably didn't turn on the networking.
And yes, this is annoying to new PostgreSQL users, but it's far safer and better than having the server start listening to the network without your explicit request.
