I have FINALLY discovered my solutions (yes, plural), and am posting this to guide others.
1) I added memory - I went from 8GB to 32GB of RAM.
2) I swapped out my 540GB SSD that was my drive "C", and installed a 1TB SSD as dirve "C". This is becuase the Adobe Elements products store all of their work files on drive "C" no matter where your photos or videos are located.
3) I wasn't able to click on any of the main tabs (File, Edit, etc.) unless the program was in full screen. It turned out that it was almost full screen (close enough that I didn't notice that it wasn't really full screen).
4) Once I was able to click on them, I turned off auto-analyzing for videos. I have several hours of videos of a chorus, and the program was going crazy trying to recognise all of the faces in them!
Now, I just wish that the program would include a window somewhere that would tell me what steps it is doing, so I could have discovered what to turn off sooner. It is so nice to be able to use the program again without abends (that were all sent to Adobe, but I never received any response back from them).