I had the same issue. Had some older npm installation and when I ran the windows installer it failed.
I did the following:
- use the installer (https://nodejs.org/en/download/) to remove node,npm
- delete from c:/Users/YOURUSER/AppData/Roaming/npm-cache and nvm folders if available
- remove c:/Program Files/node if available
- remove Environment Variables all settings for NPM and NODE. There are both in user and system wide multiple entries.
Reinstall everything with the installer.