Office Online Server Installation Error - Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper has stopped working

I have been facing this same problem for ages now: every time I try to install Office Online Server (the same thing was happening to me when installing Office Web Apps) on a fully patched Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard virtual machine on Hyper-V, with all the requirements specified here, I was getting the following error within a couple of seconds of starting the installation process:

 

Followed by:

On the Windows Application Event Log, I could see the following error:

Log Name: Application

Source: Application Error

Date: 26/01/2017 17:06:51

Event ID: 1000

Task Category: (100)

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: “server.domain.com”

Description: Faulting application name: MsiExec.exe, version: 5.0.9600.18333, time stamp: 0x572b8067

Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.3.9600.18340, time stamp: 0x57366075

Exception code: 0xe06d7363

Fault offset: 0x0000000000008a5c

Faulting process id: 0x404

Faulting application start time: 0x01d277f6952f3bec

Faulting application path: C:\Windows\System32\MsiExec.exe

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll

Report Id: d3dae5ea-e3e9-11e6-80c1-00155d01040e

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

I could only find one website with the exact same problem and it said to change the Power Options from High Performance to Balanced. However, that didn’t work for me... I’ve been having this same problem on multiple VMs, in Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Windows 10, both with Office Web Apps and Office Online Server...

It was only thanks to the great MVP community, more precisely fellow MVP Vasil Michev, that I found a solution for this problem. It turns out that there is a missing registry key at HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer. Vasil told me he was experiencing the same issue and that creating the following keys solved the problem for him:

If (!(Test-Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer)) {
 New-Item -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer | Out-Null
}

$regProps = Get-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer
If (!$regProps.logging) {
 New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer -Name logging -Value voicewarmup -PropertyType String | Out-Null
}

If (!$regProps.debug) {
 New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer -Name debug -Value 3 -PropertyType DWord | Out-Null
}

Vasil mentioned he found the answer in this StackExchange.com forum topic, which was in turn answered by Dragan Radovic with a link to his blog post at DevFacto.com.

After creating these keys, I was able to successfully install Office Web Apps:

I still don’t understand why I am having this issue since Office Web Apps on different Hyper-V environments but it seems that it works fine for most people though...

Thank you Vasil!