Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions. I had already tried most of them, but did some over again plus ran various windows checking tools, etc.
Long story short: I am still not able to update my Windows 10 system to windows 11.
- Installed Driver Booster and made sure every driver was up to the latest level
- Despite my motherboard having TPM in Firmware (Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro), I ordered and installed a physical TPM module (just to be sure)
- I upgraded my UEFI firmware on the motherboard to the very latest level
- I analyzed the setupact.log and setuperr.log files and was not able to find anything that gave me any bright ideas about how to proceed
- I ran setupdiag and didn't find anything I could use
- I ran the system file checker tool (sfc), which corrected some issues
Nothing worked, so I gave up (for now) and carved out a new 128GB partition on my nvme drive and installed the windows 11 ISO file onto that, and am now using dual boot between Windows 10 and Windows 11. Not the way I wanted it to work, but for now it seems to be the only way I can get any Windows 11 testing done.
Between the windows 11 hardware requirements and the problems updating from Windows 10 to Windows 11, I am afraid not many will be able to run Windows 11 - unless they buy a new computer with Windows 11 preinstalled.
Thanks again for your support,
Alfred