I was in the process of installing SharePoint 2013 Pre-requisites and the installer kept failing during AppFabric 1.1 installation.

Tried the installation manually (off-line) mode as well as on-line mode with the same experience. Checked all the KB patches but nothing fixed the issue.
So, if your issue is not related to PSModulePath (path pointed towards Powershell – you will find a couple of posts if you Bing/Google), then this may solve your issue.

Pre-requisite installer failed with the following error

2012-08-16 14:48:08 – Last return code (0X643=1603)
2012-08-16 14:48:08 – Error: The tool was unable to install Windows Server AppFabric.
2012-08-16 14:48:08 – Last return code (0X643=1603)

Review your application log & custom actions log. It is usually found on the temp folder..
C:\Users\username\appdata\Local\temp
Customs log would be named something like this “AppServerSetup1_1_CustomActions(datetime).log” I found these entries in my log

Executing action : Microsoft.ApplicationServer.InstallHelper.SQMTaskInstallAction
SQMTaskInstall areguments –  /create /tn “\Microsoft\Windows\AppFabric\Customer Experience Improvement Program\Consolidator” /xml “C:\Program Files\AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server\Consolidator.xml”
Error: ERROR: The network address is invalid.

After decent amount of time spent on log reviews, I was able to identify the problem…

So, what happens is AppFabric installation proceeds through each step and on some steps it will invoke schtasks.exe to finish the task. In my case, it Task Scheduler service was disabled, so it failed half way through. In corporate setup, Task Scheduler service may be disabled because of Active Directory Group Policy (GPO). The recommended path is to reach out to your IT team and have them turn on the service.

On your local VM, you can hack your way out by making this registry change
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Schedule] Change the following value
“Start”=dword:00000004 (Disabled) To
“Start”=dword:00000002 (Automatic)
If the service is still not enabled, reboot the machine.

Once this step is complete and Task Scheduler service is running, SharePoint 2013 pre-reqs installer will successfully complete the AppFabric 1.1 installation.
Happy Troubleshooting!!!