I have an inherited spreadsheet that I really don't want to rebuild at the moment. It's a simple small workbook that is small (< 200 rows that don't even reach to AA) and does nothing more than calculate some totals within the same worksheets. No macros, no external data sources, nothing beyond basic formatting of dates, numbers and strings.

I see importing data from CSV/text has created many many workbook connections over time, but even if I delete them all (there were hundreds) it makes no difference in performance.

Even clicking to simply change focus from cell to cell takes 10+ seconds, adorned by the spinning cursor and (Not Responding) appending to the title bar and the application locking up. The program seems to "recover" every time, but efficiency of editing this file is obviously seriously handicapped.

All other files seem fine in Excel, and other programs have no apparent performance issues. I see Excel is chewing up CPU but I'm not sure how to narrow down what process or service is "clashing" with Excel. I tried the same file on other computers and performance is fine. If I turn off all start-up services and run only Excel, performance is restored... until I start using other programs and then it bogs down again.

At this point, I would entertain almost any idea, theory or suggestion that helps pinpoint, solve or work around the issue.