Problem:
A long story short, a bad USB adapter killed motherboard USB headers. The system was old enough that buying a new CPU/motherboard would be as much as buying a used motherboard. I decided to do a new build, and with a fresh install my OS. While installing Visual Studio Community 2022, I found that the installer would download files, but then die when trying to perform the install. I had earlier had a BSOD issue with a PCI card, and ended up running a repair on my system. This messed up a lot of my just installed applications including Visual Studio. Oddly, the installer did not list a specified file, the rest of the error popup was blank.
Solution:
After researching their cleanup tool (which you can only get if you successfully installed VS) and reading a couple SO posts, I decided to just try something. I renamed my application directories for
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio
and tried the installer again. This time it worked.
Keep in mind this will likely mess with any settings you have already in place.
