AMPPS 4.6.7 & PHP 5.6.9 on Win 7 Pro SP1 x64 4Gb server
It turned out that this was either a WordPress problem or a server misconfiguration, depending on which way you look at it, but I failed to include Curl when I recompiled Apache and once I did that, everything was back to normal.
Softaculous is now doing exactly what it should, in fact, it always was only this problem with with Apache/Curl masked that.
Thanks so much for all your help. Great job and great product!