This finally, after nearly 3 hours and 2 calls later, Not to mention a couple years of dealing with this Serialization runtime error, this seems to have been resolved with a work around and manipulation of the screen resolution. The work around is the fact that I have been asking for the state download executable (alone) to be sent to me and had been told by every TT support person that you can only get it through the fed download, which is a very tedious exercise. After repairing, uninstalling, reinstalling, several times, a supervisor finally sent me the direct state download that I had been requesting all along, and it worked very quickly. She also led me to play around with the screen resolution. She found that mine was very high (300%), which I was not experiencing from my vantage point. It looked to be a normal on my surface pro. However from her end, using screen sharing feature, she said that it was gigantic (apparently). The funny thing is that I had been on at least 2 screen sharing calls before hers and no one had mentioned that the screen was oversized on their end. As a result of the download of the state executable I was able to move forward with my taxes (2020), and also for the 1st time in a few years, I did not run into the "runtime error re Serialization" after the install. Now was this due to getting the State software downloaded, or playing with the screen resolution to make it much too small, but viewable with glasses? I suspect that both helped because I completed the state return from previous years and the Serialization problem persisted. I believe I was sent the state download as a work around in previous years as well. The only difference in the runtime error was playing around with the screen resolution. Hope this is helpful for those who are suffering from this ridiculous error that TT claims is not their issue, (and maybe it isn't) but at least TT should know that it's happening and maybe offer some solution to try. This supervisor never even heard of the problem. Thankfully she got it working!
