Never mind, I ended up solving the problem, though not quite sure where the issue was.
After numerous install/reinstall attempts I installed the Atom package in the julia command line successfully, and then opened Atom successfully. It showed INFO: Precompiling module Atom... and succeeded. The difference this time may have been that Matlab was running previously, and windows alerted me about Matlab having some memory issue. I killed Matlab, and the performed the aforementioned steps with success. Perhaps a virtual memory issue on my system, perhaps a conflict with matlab, perhaps just Murphy's Law at it again.
