SQL Server Setup Failure 0x84B10001 (SQL 2012 SP2 and SQL 2014 Standard)

I'm having a problem with SQL Server Setup. I had SQL Server 2012 R2 SP1 installed, and the SP2 installer would fail.

I decided to just get SQL Server 2014. The setup (and system configuration checker) for that fails with the same error.

SQL Server Setup failure
SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:
'.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 231747.
Error code 0x84B10001

I found this and other posts about similar problems that point at MSDE being the cause.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/bc9f4949-1b45-427c-aa2b-d2222488a13e/problems-installing-sql-server-2012error-code-0x84b10001?forum=sqlexpress

I definitely had MSDE installed, but I went through the steps to manually remove it and rebooted with no luck.

/* Don Reynolds */