Finally got it to work after a numerous times of uninstalling, manual deleting remnants of prior installs. Currently set it to use the SQL server 2019 as new stuff going forward from SambaPOS will demand it.
I believe the main reason is when installing/uninstalling the same machine with different options will leave things things behind that confuse the subsequent install. In my case, I believe it was the .NET Framework or C++ runtime. During uninstalling of SambaPOS, it did not uninstall the runtime along with it. But different version of the .NET Framework or C++ runtime may have caused the issues.