My computer refused to boot up one morning, and I had to get technicians to copy the hard drive to an external drive and then transfer the program and data files from the external drive to a new computer. 

Most of that went smoothly, but some programs add files to the Windows system directories when installed and there was no way to determine what those were.  So, I likely missed some required files which meant I had to reinstall from the original source.  Fortunately, I keep all program installation files so I can reinstall whenever I need to.

One effect of the file transfers is that the modification date of over half of the files was reset to the date of the transfer to the new computer.  That's one of the things that motivated me to check what was left after uninstalling Lacerte.  I figured that having the wrong modification date might have corrupted some files.  If the reinstallation was not replacing those files, the program might fail to work correctly.

It seems like that idea was functionally correct.  After deleting all of the files except for the data directories, the new installation worked as it should.