It works now! Thank you Matt Clark and Nightwacher.
I have had trouble installing Visual Studio 2015 for months (which I believe was the issue). I kept getting hung up on the installation’s restore point phase: a common issue for many people. No amount of HD space or reinstalling could fix it.
However when I installed the new Visual Studio 2017, both my windows 7 and visual studio updated and after a restart I am using UNREAL4. So far everything is running smooth! Thank you!
I did try reinstaling my c++ redist package after uninstalling and clearing the registry entries, but my pc kept telling me it was still installed. Most likely it was also installed on another drive, and since the 2017 visual studio installation seems to have fixed my problem I didn’t investigate further.