elements 11 works fine on windows 7...not so much on windows 10

I would definitely follow John's advice and update Windows 10 (before Windows 11 possibly gets announced in a week or so  😉

I installed Elements 11 on my Win 10 machine a couple of months ago and it is working fine.  But your error messages remind me that there was possibly a problem with extracting zipped files that I downloaded from my Adobe account.  Here are the files that I downloaded:

I think I assumed that this was a self-extracting download, using the exe file.  But IIRC, I had to use a zip file extractor to properly extract the files.  If you downloaded the installation files like I did, you can right-click on the .7z file and see if Windows has an option to extract the files for you.  Otherwise, you may need a zip utility to do this.  There are plenty of free ones available.

And @John Waller, FYI,  I have successfully installed Elements 10-13 on my Win 10 computer.  Others are known to have installed versions going as far back as Elements 6.

Firstly, your version of Windows 10 (Build 1809) is very old. That's the Oct 2018 update. It's missing almost 3 years worth of security fixes and updates.

If your hardware allows it, I suggest you first update Windows to the current version 21H1 (May 2021).

Adobe says Elements 14 and later are compatible with Windows 10. Not sure if anyone has successfully installed Elements 11 via workarounds. If they have, hopefully they will chime in.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/kb/windows-10-compatibility-faq.html