Thanks for the suggestions, because there's no way I would have known to search for the two threads you suggested.
I did some cleaning up, put the installer into a specific folder and excluded it from the virus scanner. The installer rean, reloaded a couple of times, created the gw2-64.exe file in the location I specified for the game to be installed with a desktop shortcut, then stopped. Double-clicking the desktop icon does nothing, and running the .exe file directly does nothing. I'm going to try excluding the exe file from the virus scanner, but for some reason the virus scanner interface is broken. 😞