Cannot activate 1st or 2nd donation edition

[cecilstrange]

I installed and activated a donation edition in place of an older free version on my laptop.

Then I installed the same donation edition on a new build for my wife--a PC I must maintain because she has resisted learning the slightest bit of file management for more than two decades. I had to restore the OS two or three times before I got the RAID and drive cache scheme worked out. That left ffs thinking it had been installed on four machines.

Back on my laptop, ffs alerted me about an upgrade and I clicked yes. Now ffs on the laptop fails to activate. I thought a quick workaround would be to make another donation and reinstall the new version but no such luck. Then I put the portable version on a USB flash drive but that won't activate or run either.

Is there a fix or should I uninstall on both PCs and go back to using the free version? I did a search and read through lots of posts about related problems but I did not find a fix.