node npm install -g bower FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_2 on Win7

Windows 7 Enterprise, Git and Node installed. When I try to

    npm install -g bower

in command prompt (as administrator or user) on fresh node js install (x86 and x64), it sits there for 20 minutes and its memory usage slowly climbs up to 2GB of RAM. After 20 minutes it crashes with

    FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_2 Allocation failed - process out of memory.

Any ideas about how to install bower globally?

UPDATE: It looks like npm fails to install any package globally (yeoman, grunt). Clearing cache, installing and reinstalling different node js versions or package version doesn't help. I get a bunch of ENOENT and EPERM errors if I don't run

    npm rm -g bower
    npm cache clean

first. I think the part of the problem could be that my Windows profile is stored on unix server and the path length to my AppData/Roaming is about 100 characters long.