Thank you for that response! Since I am part-time and also gave up soon, it took me a while to return. I agree that we should contact Dell and see what license we can recover. Apparently to contact Dell we may want to have an order number, which is not very easy to find, but that is another issue.

I looked in the application log and security log and system log in the Windows 7 Control Panel Administrator Event Viewer, and saw many disturbing items. There was a Blue Screen on the morning of the 15th so that made me think there is something bad with that computer, and we may want to reinstall the OS or something. I can see events where the Windows license is being checked but there aren't many details.

I only see a few restore points I could restore to.

It is still a mystery to me how the present situation arose. I seem to see some indication that there wasn't an Office 2013 license, but I think they told me that there was. It is a mystery so far. Conceivably they had a license for some earlier version and are sore that it won't upgrade, but they said everything was just fine until the 15th when it broke. (Wednesday).

What help can I get with understanding the event logs?

I will try to get back to it this afternoon. Thanks again.