How It Worked

Could not install office (installer quit after serial number screen) no disk manager (leave logical disk manager next time)

Update: the problem was with Windows Installer, and installing the latest version (3.1) solved it.

One of the nLite parameters has disabled error reporting, and I didn't discover the cause of the error until I tried a full install:

"msiexec.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close."