I want to thank all your help with this. It turns out that the installation on my wife's computer of that time was still available. Although I'd done a clone upgrade of hers as well, resulting in an install requiring the activation code, her original computer was still available with a working installation.
I am going to follow up on Donin's suggestion on how to cope with Intuit's help line. This isn't the first time I've discovered that navigating bot-driven help trees has to draw on "lore" that is not made directly available to customers. Intuit is trying to save human labor expenses at our expense.
