Why am I getting this error when I try locally debugging an Azure app?

When I try launching a local instance of a Azure MVC webapp with Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, I get the following error:

Invalid class string (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800401F3 (CO_E_CLASSSTRING))

Any ideas why, or what I can do to get past it? It occurs while the Windows Azure emulator says the following message "Starting roles for the application in the Windows Azure compute emulator"

This problem is discussed here with various similar symptoms and possible fixes and you can go through to check what could be your issue.

In most cases, installing IIS (from Windows Azure Features On/Off) does solve this problem so you can try that.