I loaded Office 2010 successfully.  When I tried to transfer my exiting calendar .ics file Outlook would not open.  I tried to delete Outlook alone but could not figure out how to do so under Windows 8; so, I uninstalled the entire Office 2010 program.  I then tried to reinstall it hoping that Outlook would be corrected in the process.  It didn't work.  I can't install the program at all.  It gets to about 60% on the installation progress bar and hangs.  I let the installation run even though it appeared hung for 2 hours.  Nothing happened and the progress bar remained unchanged.

I then tried to cancel the installation so that all of the files installed would be removed.  The cancel request also hung and would not remove anything, but no installation shows up under the remove/repair installed programs list.  Do I need a program to cleanse the original files loaded from the registry or some other location?  This is really frustrating.

I'm assuming that reinstalling Windows 8 and deleting all other data won't work either, but I'm willing to do it if necessary.

Thank, for your prompt attention

I know this post is from November last year but I was having the same issue and found a solution. Try stopping the Print Spooler service. That did it for me. After I stopped the service the installation didn't hang and ran all the way to the end without any trouble. To disable the Print Spooler service, go to Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services. Look for Print Spooler, right click it and click Stop. Hopefully, you already found a solution by now. If not I hope this helps. 

I had this same problem for quite a while on Windows 8.1, and while I didn't expect this to work it finally allowed me to uninstall Office. Thanks for the tip!

I can't believe that this worked, but it did. I have no idea why I thought that my DVD drive was going bad. Thanks for your help

I'm glad this helped. At least in my case, this happened because of some bad printer drivers. I was able to find the printer at fault and update it's drivers but it still causes this issue every time I install Windows updates for MS Office.