I'm running Office 2000 and Windows 98. Excel crashes badly when I save.
Two Ctrl-Alt-Deletes get me as far as "exit excel" but that doesn't work. I
always have to reboot.

I have reloaded Windows 98 twice. I have removed Office 2000 completely and
then reloaded it, again twice.

I don't have antivirus software on this machine. Other machines with
antivirus aren't detecting any virus activity on my zip disk files. I at
least have a router and I don't use MS Outlook, which cuts down on viral
attacks. Yahoo mail screens incoming email files.

Is there some file, some kind of normal.dot, that is getting through? I"ve
already dealt with MS Word's normal.dot and now I erase the thing on sight.
I someday want to write an autoexec.bat line that erases normal.dot when
booting up every day.

Is some third party software somehow reaching across and whacking Excel?

I'm low on money, so what's the safest free way to check for a virus? Can
you name a trial period product that I can successfully erase afterwards
without internal nags forever?

Does this only happen on one workbook or all workbooks?

If it happens on just one, then it sounds like that workbook is corrupted and
may need to be rebuilt.

Does it happen whenever you save or only when you're closing excel? If it
happens when you're closing excel, it could be a corrupted *.xlb file.

*.xlb (name and location change with versions of windows/excel) is the file that
contains your customized toolbars. One of the things excel does when you're
closing, not just saving, is update this file.

You could close excel and find that file and rename it to see if it helps.

close excel
windows start button|find|*.xlb
rename any you find to *.xlbold
and test it out.

===
You may want to try opening excel in safe mode to see if that changes anything.
close excel
windows start button|Run
excel /safe
file|Open your workbook
test it out.
===

If that didn't help (or if it's just one workbook), maybe opening the workbook
in OpenOffice and saving there would clean it up enough for excel to accept it.

http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD

If it's just one file and the file is really important, there are commercial
recovery services. I've never used it, but you might want to check into:
http://www.officerecovery.com

====
I also use win98 (but with xl2002). If excel crashes, sometimes it leaves a
hidden process running. WinNT and Win2k (and WinXP??) have the ability to see
and kill those hidden processes.

I use a shareware program called "OuttaSight"
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...id,4922,00.asp

That allows me to do the same thing in win98 so I don't have to reboot (although
I like the older version 2.68 better--it seems better behaved).



Paul Klinkman wrote:

I'm running Office 2000 and Windows 98. Excel crashes badly when I save.
Two Ctrl-Alt-Deletes get me as far as "exit excel" but that doesn't work. I
always have to reboot.

I have reloaded Windows 98 twice. I have removed Office 2000 completely and
then reloaded it, again twice.

I don't have antivirus software on this machine. Other machines with
antivirus aren't detecting any virus activity on my zip disk files. I at
least have a router and I don't use MS Outlook, which cuts down on viral
attacks. Yahoo mail screens incoming email files.

Is there some file, some kind of normal.dot, that is getting through? I"ve
already dealt with MS Word's normal.dot and now I erase the thing on sight.
I someday want to write an autoexec.bat line that erases normal.dot when
booting up every day.

Is some third party software somehow reaching across and whacking Excel?

I'm low on money, so what's the safest free way to check for a virus? Can
you name a trial period product that I can successfully erase afterwards
without internal nags forever?

--

Dave Peterson