One of my soon-to-be-ex-friends got an Excel file from another friend of his and decided to click on it. It started opening all kinds of files from within Excel. Over 200 and still counting when he called me. I told him to go to task manager, which showed a LOT of files in the applications tab, but only one Excel.exe in the processes tab. Closing it down there, closed down Excel. I then CrossLooped in to see if I could give him a helping hand. Each time Excel was re-opened, the mass influx of files started. They were all kinds of files, PDFs, Docs, JPGs, even some spreadsheets. It looked like the end of solitaire, with multiple windows opening (XP) and the counter on the lone Excel button on the task bar counting off the files. I did the task manager exit routine and went looking for temp files. I CrapCleaned out the system. Made sure I went through the files created in the last hour and deleted anything with a temp anywhere in it. I also deleted the crappy infected/corrupted file from it's place on the desktop (yeah, I know, I yelled for 15 minutes on THAT subject). Despite a delousing, the restart of Excel, which complained of a deactivated add-in, would start the cascading windows, whether I answered yes or no to that question. Yes, it knew it had a serious crash, but why would it just keep on trying to load the bad file, even when I got rid of it?

But here's the real question. WHERE was it loading from? I went through the backup folder and NOTHING was there!

So what's the process for starting Excel WITHOUT it trying to do a crash recovery? Sort of makes me feel stupid at times.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this issue. GM