I decided to try out the new Microsoft developer tools that come with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 to get a feel for the software. When I downloaded the product, I received a web installer which in turn downloaded the necessary components and installed them. It was a somewhat slow install process. Once a good portion of the install completed, I was presented with the following error message:

I used the usual Microsoft suggestions - you probably guessed it - retry the install, reboot the computer etc. I did all this with the assumption that there was something going on with my computer. None of these turned out to be useful in resolving the issue. So my next approach was to look through log files and possible conflicts, but that didn't help either. Then, I stumbled upon a Russian blog article. If you have the patience to translate (Firefox has a wonderful translation add-on) you can try to make sense of it. Or, you can read what worked for me. The underlying issue is that the redistributables in the Visual Studio installer mix up the 32 and 64 bit Dlls. In particular, vcruntime140.dll in the c:\windows\system32 folder and c:\windows\syswow64.

Here are the steps I took to resolve the issue:

1. Uninstall Visual Studio 2015 components (or whatever was left of it) from the "Programs and Features" of your computer.
2. Uninstall Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable - both (x86) and (x64) versions.
3. Download the Visual Studio C++ 2015 Redistributable install package from Microsoft. It is readily available as a download. Install both 32 and 64 bit versions if you have a 64 bit computer.
4. Reboot to be safe and restart the Visual Studio 2015 installer. This time the setup finished and I was greeted with a wonderful "Setup Completed!" message.