A tip of the propeller beanie to mstoveken!
I have been trying, for two days, to install Office 2010 onto a fresh install of Windows 10. I tried the FixIt; tried 32-bit and 64-bit; tried safe mode; etc. This fix, pre-install the OSE service, did the trick.
I wrote a batch file to do the install. If anyone is interested, I will post it.