I had MC 23, very happy, purchased the upgrade in May and since then have not been able to install it either of my 2 W10 computers that had previous MC23 installs.
On one of them I did a complete uninstall and the behavior did not change.
It extracts the files, asks if I allow Win to make changes, I hit yes and it quits right there.
I did manage to install successfully in a W10 VM under VirtualBox even with Defender installed and no exclusions.
I have tried disabling Defender, adding exclusion for the executable, no luck.
I read the article on 'taming Defender' but could not add more of the Media Center 25 exclusions because the files/folders are not there. I did manually create a Media Center 25 empty folder and added it to the exclusions
I also ran MSCONFIG and started a clean boot w/ all services and startup programs disabled. No luck.
I have also tried installing as Admin, thinking about a possible permissions issue although the user I usually use has admin privileges. In this case it did not extract the files.
The amount of time spent on this is insane but would still appreciate some thoughts.