Wow, great follow-up questions SweetieJean Level 15 You sound like a "tax professional"! Do you happen to know the answers to all three variants? Sounds like the requirement was 7 people (e.g. a large or extended family with a single tax patri/matri-arch). Is there any level higher than 15? If so, do you have far to go to achieve 16?
When I stumbled upon this thread last year (2020) I was investigating a slightly different variation of this problem. In my case I purchased desktop copy of TT Deluxe on CD to do returns for three people (two in MA, one in VT) and used the free state for MA and bought the 2nd state for VT. Then my newly widowed sister-in-law, residing in CA, needed my help doing her return and had already purchased her own copy of TT Deluxe. My options were to either buy 2nd state download for CA and use my copy of TT to do her return, or use her already purchased copy since it would then allow me to download her CA state software for free. She sent me the CD she'd purchased but I only had one TT compatible PC (with Windows 10) at my disposal.
In retrospect I should have contacted TT support to find a way to just use the product key for the 2nd TT CD to unlock the CA software on the already installed of TT Deluxe on my PC. Instead I unwisely assumed that I'd be able to uninstall my copy of TT Deluxe (after saving the TT tax files for the three returns I'd already completed) then re-install using the CD my sister-in-law sent me. BAD IDEA.
I did what I believed to be a total de-install of TT (this was for the 2019 tax year) using the Win10 tools for this, but clearly there were some significant TT data files stashed somewhere that did not get removed so that even after installing the 2nd copy of TT Deluxe using my sister-in-law's CD, the new copy somehow continued to believe I'd already used my free state download (from the earlier installation). Note that I wasn't trying to circumvent the 5-efile limit in this case since I'd only filed 3 returns at this point. I was just trying to circumvent needing to pay to download CA with the MA and VT state's that I'd already used with the 1st copy. Note that none of the return's I filed ever needed more than one associated state's return. I spent a large amount of time on this but I was never able to get an answer to the full "clean out" procedure to totally remove all traces of the earlier TT installation so that the 2nd CD installation would appear to be "clean and fresh" and allow me to access the free state I was entitled to with the 2nd purchased copy of TT Deluxe. Since I had registered the 1st copy during the installation and activation, I assume the difficulty with getting a 2nd copy to installed had something to do with the IP address (since I was using the same computer and internet connection for the 2nd install).
