Glenn,
From my ten years experience in this forum, I have seen the same question asked many times. We, forum volunteers, generally suggest to call Customer Care and we often get positive feedback for an accepted exchange. Nothing is due to the customer in this case, but it's a win/win situation for both the customer and Adobe. We can't promise anything ourselves, but we can give some hope.
The more critical issues when dealing with the support is that such help is typically restricted to the two more recent versions, in which case the rule for the agents is to send the customer to this forum.
Unfortunately, there is a kind of issue which is different from the suppport and help for older versions: it's the ability to re-download older versions from your account and the ability to deactivate no longer available computers. It's rather common to see support agents refusing to deactivate old versions of Elements even if they are supposed to help in this case (that only requires one minute). In similar cases, you should insist politely and ask to speak to a suuperior agent. You can try again a bit later.
Anyway, the question is:
Are you still in possession of your old version installers?
So, be sure to keep them in a safe location. I have been able to recover the installers for all the versions I have owned.
If you have bought and downloaded your versions directly from Adobe, you can generally recover your download links as well as your license keys from your account, but don't rely on it, the policy for Adobe to keep the activation servers may be subject to changes. I have even copies of the the older versions which are not covered by the servers: copies of the installation CDs/DVDs.
Better prevent than cure: if you have a little free time, do a search for the installers, generally in your downloads folders.
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