In the interest of full disclosure, I cannot confirm if this resolved the issue or not, but the activation server being down would make some sense. Before this post, I got a response from Amazon (paraphrasing) that lots of people were having similar issues and they would issue a refund if I called them. I did that and got a refund instead of proceeding with attempting to solve it. To be clear... the error message in TurboTax made no sense. It indicated a problem with "my" network; not with something on the TurboTax side. Online help attempted to send me down the rabbit trail of firewall settings, etc. None of this was an issue, so it appeared - to the end user (me) - that the software is broken. At this point, I can neither confirm nor deny if that's the case. But I suspect, if the activation server was down, and now it is not, that one could probably activate the software. I could not.
