When installing or uninstalling Visual Studio 2012/2013, the installer might get stuck right at the beginning:
On some forums, users reported that this may be due to UAC, and recommended lowering the UAC setting:
However, there is another setting you could check first, and it was the actual cause of my copy of Visual Studio getting stuck during installation: the amount of storage available for creating system restore points. To check it, open System in the Control Panel:
Click/tap on the System protection link in the left pane
Select the system disk (usually C:), and then click on Configure:
Make sure that system protection is enabled, and that the slider below is at least at 1%, meaning that system restore points will use up to 1% of total disk space.
Letting system protection enabled with a 0% of allowed usage of disk space will cause the Visual Studio installer to try creating a system restore point when it is not allowed to write it, and so it will get stuck.