Inventory or lock issue during Opatch

Hello, we are using Oracle v12.2.0.1.0 on Windows (x64) servers, using Windows Server 2012 R2. Our OPatch version is 12.2.0.1.24. When running Opatch apply or opatch rollback, we receive the following message: 

OPatchSession cannot load inventory for the given Oracle Home <ORACLE_HOME>. Possible causes are:

1                No read or write permission to ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage

2                Central Inventory is locked by another OUI instance

3                 No read permission to Central Inventory

4                 The lock file exists in ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage

5                  The Oracle Home does not exist in Central Inventory

UtilSession failed: null

OPatch failed with error code = 73

... to which my rebuttals are: 

Permissions in .patch_storage and Central Inventory are the same as our other successful Virtual Machine patching environments.