Can’t close Excel (Office XP for Students and Teachers)

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I suddenly can’t close Excel. It saves OK, but when I try to close the app (click on the ‘x’) I get an error message saying “Excel has encountered a problem and must close”, with the option to send the error message or not. (attachment) I’ve tried both options but in either case I seem to be lost in an infinite loop, saying “Excel has recovered your file” (tried to have a 2nd attachment but it didn’t work) and I then try to save it and close — wheeee, back to the first error message.
I have the original CDs so if necessary, I can remove MS Office and re-install, if there isn’t anything easier that would keep my data (like the .pst files for Outlook!) — of course the XL, Word, and PPT files are saved in My Documents. And I could make (another) backup of my Outlook messages. (I have a weekly backup of that on my external backup hard drive.)
On another topic: Is it possible to a) have more than one attachment, or insert small (<50kb) files into the message?

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You could try running “Help > Detect and Repair…”

In addition check out the options in Systematic Approach to Behavioral Problems in XL

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Tony — thanks for the suggestions. I will try both.

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Although originally meant for startup problems, it might be worthwhile to check out Jan Karel Pieterse’s Systematic Approach to Behavioral Problems in XL.

You can attach only one file to a post, but that can be a zip file containing multiple files. The size of the zip file must be less than 100 KB.

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Tony also suggested the “Systematic Approach…” so I will definitely try that.
As to the multiple attachment question, I never thought of a zip file, which would have solved my problem, since I’d already reduced the file size of the .jpg files so that the would have fit in a folder that would be smaller than 100 KB.

Thanks for the help.

Joyce

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Thanks to everyone for the help you gave me. Unfortunately, nothing worked until I completely removed and re-installed MS Office. But that was relatively painless, just a tad time-consuming. Even the remove application was so good on keeping internal files, that the first time I opened Excel, I got the same problematical file again — aaaarrrgh! But when I closed it, it behaved, and the new file opened nice and blank; opening a recent document was just the way it should be, with all the data entry I did yesterday. While this was a bit of a pain, I wasn’t totally upset, since I had done a complete HD backup only two days ago!

Thanks again.

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