I called my local computer store and told the tech, who I also consider a friend, what the issue was and asked him to handle it.  He came by and called support and got a very different response.  After having him try the usual stuff, that support person called the licensing department and spoke to them and then had my tech/friend sync the license for about the tenth time, but this time QuickBooks said that we had a three-user license and everything worked just fine after that.

Thank you all for your input.  Calling and getting a different support person made all the difference.

Also, the multiple posts on here is because I keep getting a "Authentication Ticket Mismatched, failed authentication" error even though the post is going through.