Well, after most of a day of trying a whole lot of things, I think we've managed to figure it out.
First, install IE11. For some idiotic reason Adobe wrote the Animate installer to require IE11, which doesn't exist anymore as far as Microsoft's concerned.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41628
Then install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2013 (64-bit)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784
Finally, run the Animate 2018 installer. Should work now!
... View more