Problem with Intel Management Engine Interface

Hi all. My neighbor gave me their Dell XPS 8700 - purchased Jan 2014 with Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit and now running the 20H2 version of Win 10 Home -- to find a needy home for it. They said it was just too slow and they replaced it. I found that it had 4 active AV packages and one network tunneling utility running concurrently. Figuring that was the cause of the slowness, I removed them all and, sure enough, it now zips around pretty much as you would expect. Except for one thing...

It takes forever to start up after displaying the Windows page with the spinning wheel. Thinking this appeared to be a device enumeration issue, I took a look at the Device Manager and, sure enough, there is a yellow exclamation mark next to the Intel Management Engine Interface entry under System Devices. There are multiple entries in the event log for this item as follows...
==============================
Device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C3A&SUBSYS_05B71028&REV_04\3&11583659&0&B0 requires further installation.
...was migrated
...was configured
...had a problem starting

...was deleted <<== I uninstalled it
...was not migrated due to partial or ambigous match
...was configured
...had a problem starting
==============================

Updating the driver came back with the "best driver is already installed" message. Dell Update found 4 drivers and installed them but that didn't change anything. Intel Update found a storage driver but, again, that didn't change anything. All of Dell's diagnostics run fine with no issues found. I powered it down and removed the battery, pressing the on/off button for about 30 seconds to drain anything that might be being stored in a capacitor somewhere. No change.

I have found and read about 20 posts/threads on this and all but two just ended with no solution. One of the two that said they solved it said they "recovered" Win 8 and rolled everything forward to fix it. This PC has never had Win 8 on it. The other, more promising thread, was found on this forum. Unfortunately, the link to Intel that supposedly fixed the problem brings up "page not found". I think it might have been a link to the latest Win 8 chipset drivers which I have also tried with no luck.

I see people posting other problems with their XPS 8700s that appear to be running Win 10 and they make no mention of this issue.

Does anyone know if this is a fixable problem, and, if so, how I can fix it?

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for whatever help you can offer me with this.

Howard