Hey @bluerate, Welcome to the community forums!
Often times, when Local has trouble starting up the Virtual Machine, this has to do with something preventing VirtualBox from working correctly. This could be something like an Antivirus software, or other security setting.
Do you have any antivirus software installed? If so, you might try disabling or uninstalling it, restarting the computer, and re-try installing Local.
If that doesn’t get things working, can you please provide your local-by-flywheel.log file? See this Community Forum post for instructions on how to do so: