Update:
After many hours of phone calls, reading forums, web searches etc over a 30 hour period, I finally found a real live person for tech support. An hour later, my form was finally filed.
It turns out that the glitch was due to having an overseas (Russian) IP address. Since I live overseas, that would seem to be an obvious, but she had to do some kind of override. I had to use a USA address in my personal info for some of the identity confirmation, and then return and re-edit back to my actual address. Fortunately my sister works nights, since I had to use a USA cell phone number for one part of it and didn't want to wake up my dad at 5:30am, for the code they sent.
Obviously, the service has some issues for users located outside of the US. In fairness, two other friends here use TurboTax yearly, without these issues. This was my first time.
I am very grateful that the real person I finally reached spent the hour necessary to troubleshoot the problem, and walk me through the hoops until the return was filed.
