Wasted a long time time on the phone with the TurboTax support people who im the end seem to not be familiar with basic IT concepts and in the end sent a link to this article and hung up. Hoping to save someone else from going around in circles.
You can choose to use the cd to install OR download (this is an exclusive or meaning you can't do both). If you were unfortunate to have installed using the cd first you must use that cd to install on another computer. Period. It seems to generate some local account to assign that key to that has nothing to do with your TurboTax account (seemingly as a way to keep track of the number of times it has been used but why they don't ask you to log in/create an account is a mystery). Fear not your extra software installs are not gone. You need to either put that cd directly into subsequent computers or pull the files off the cd and transfer them to the second computer. Once you do that run setup.exe as administrator and the install completes, then you can register the product using that key. The file transfer itself is the tricky part. You might be able to put it on a usb thumb drive. You might be able to put it on a network location. I ran into some difficulties because several files are binary executables and platforms like Google Drive or sending via email are going to block you for security reasons. If you're tech savvy you'll know how to get around this so I won't go into details and just assure you it can be done. In the future if you have multiple computers you should start off with the install as a download and use the cd as a beer coaster until TurboTax figures out how to fix this user authentication problem on their side.
