Solved: the file I was trying to open was my tax return file. That generated the error message every time. The one that I should have been opening was the file that was used in prior year to generate the MISC/NEC/W2 forms. That worked perfectly. So, the point for our friends at intuit is to change the error message to be more helpful. It should say: "Error. Be sure that the file you are trying to open is the one you used to generate your employee/contractor forms in the prior year."
