OK. Well, the good news is, it looks like my hypothesis that the openssl installation was the problem was right. The bad news is that I'm not totally sure how to fix it (but at least this should narrow down your problem a little bit).
The most informative part of the error seems to be the following:
Is any of this on a shared drive?
I'm going to move this topic into general and tag it with package-installation, since that's the real issue. I'd recommend taking a look at other questions re. installing openssl (e.g. I can't install this package - Install.packages("openssl"), though I'm not sure the issue is the same).
Hopefully someone will be able to whittle down the issue a bit more than I've been able to.