@BillM223 @ronniemarlofilms @baldietax
I believe I found the issue/workaround here. My spouse is covered under HDHP family plan as well through my employer but does not contribute to an HSA. Originally I only checked the HSA contribution box for myself and not my spouse -- which is accurate. But it seems because of that non-selection, the software never ran through the checklist about my spouse being covered by HDHP for the whole year, etc.
I went back and checked the HSA box for my spouse (which is not technically true since we only share mine) and the software then triggered the questionnaire about spouse being covered for 12 months. That was not occurring previously above. I simply left the contributions for the spouse's HSA = $0 and the software now runs through the rest of the HSA/HDHP questions without triggering the excess contributions error seen before.
I do not know if this constitutes an error in the software or not. But perhaps it's worth someone at Intuit looking into.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
