I've done some additional testing now.
I was able to successfully install it on my Laptop and on a VM running under VMware Workstation Pro 12.1.0.
So I'm back to trying to figure out why I cannot install on the two desktop machines.
One machine has a fair amount of software installed on it, the other one is pretty much a pristine installation of Windows 10 with the the exception of having VMware Workstation Pro 12.1.0 installed as well as the latest Acrobat Reader DC. I uninstalled both programs but still could not install SSR.
The only thing that I can really think of in common between the 2 machines where it does not work is that both are running 32GB RAM whereas machines / VMs on which I can install have less RAM.
It appears to me like the setup is crashing right at the time where the license agreement would be displayed.
To take it even a step further I manually ran the _setup program and this does successfully install the program but that's not a real solution because that seems to bypass check for necessary componets and also doesn't install any of those components. I also notice that there is no option to create recovery media when I install it that way. It also installs really fast that way so I know it's skipping the installation of a lot of components, but this was simply meant to be for testing anyway.