I had the same problem with my Dell Vostro. I ended up talking with TurboTax help. I got an agent in about 4 minutes, but it took 2 hours to finally find a solution.
After the install from either the CD or the download from web (I did both), the activation screen was blank except for title bar. There was NO box to insert the license number or Activate Now button.
After wiggling the cursor around the blank box many times I noticed that the cursor changed from a pointer cursor to an INSERT TEXT "I" beam cursor or to a pointing finger CLICK cursor at different spots on the blank page.
1. After I mentioned this the TT Agent had me change the display resolution to 1024X768.
2. Restart computer
3. Restart Turbotax. (It continued to hang on the blank Activation screen).
4. The agent indicated the entry boxes and buttons are on the blank screen but I could not see them.
5. I was instructed to move the cursor around the Activation screen until the "I" beam cursor appeared. It needs to be about 2/3 down from to top of the activation box and about 1" away from left hand side because there is a different box about 1/4 the way down as well.
6. I was able to find the box then while keeping the "I" beam visible, I moved it toward the left to be near the left hand side of the invisible entry box. The "I" beam will change when you are out side the box.
7. At this spot I entered the license key with out any hyphens or spaces. I did not bother with cap's.
8. After entering the long string of characters, I next moved to the right hand corner near the bottom where the cursor changed to a Pointing Finger and Right Clicked.
9. After about 20 seconds, the TT Registration Page appeared for my Name and Address. When you see this page, it means the license key was accepted.
10. I restarted TurboTax and it loaded immediately to the Start a New Return Page.
Once the agent realized the Activation Screen as actually live, just invisible, it only took about 5 minutes to be successful (and that long only because I tried entering the key in the invisible box only 1/4 of the way down on right side, not the box you should find about 2/3's the way down).
It appears this problem all has to deal with the video driver but even an update to most recent version from Nividia did not solve the problem. Ultimately, simply working with the blank screen with the change in cursor shapes provided enough information to work around this problem.
Then I noticed
