UPDATE:
After spending 30 minutes on the phone with TurboTax support who in that time could only come up with the advice that I "upgrade to Windows 10", which made no sense because Turbotax 2019 is supposedly still compatible with Windows 7, she (the tech support person) basically gave up and said that's all she could do. I went ahead thereafter and decided to try rebooting my computer in "safe mode with networking" (the networking part is key because you still need access to the internet to activate the software, I still had not been able to complete the activation step). Voila! I was able to activate and then use the software. I think this is the only solution to this problem and apparently the Intuit tech support people are completely unaware of it. It's sad when a bankruptcy lawyer knows more about solving software issues than people who are paid to solve these problems.
