Excel 2000 suddenly crashing my PC

[pdqcarrera]

I've been running Office 2000 on my Windows 98 PC for years with no problems and suddenly now Excel won't run. When opening Excel the computer locks up for several minutes then "resources low" warnings start popping up and then it all crashes.

So far I have:
1. Reinstalled Office 2000. No change.
2. Removed and reinstalled Office 2000. No change.
3. Removed and reinstalled Excel. No change.
4. Read about ODBC corruptions causing similar problems and so ran a diagnostics program and reinstalled the original verion 2.5 RMT and that didn't work.
5. Updated ODBC to 2.6. and that didn't work.

Unfortunately this particular computer has a lot of old proprietary engineering software that I still need to be able use which will not run on newer OS so I cannot upgrade the OS (in case this is the best fix).

If anybody has any suggestions I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!
Bossco

 

[WW]

excel virus...and maybe you're not deleting the template that is infected? run housecall.antivirus.com or an updated installed scanner...

can you run it in safe mode?

anything else running?

anything else (word, access, etc) behave like that?

 

[pdqcarrera]

<< excel virus...and maybe you're not deleting the template that is infected? run housecall.antivirus.com or an updated installed scanner...>>
No virus(es).
All templates OK.

<<can you run it in safe mode?>>
Nope

<<anything else running?>>
Nope

<<anything else (word, access, etc) behave like that?>>
Nope

 

[pdqcarrera]

Thanks WW for responding. Your note about the templates actually did help (although I'd already checked into them before) because you made me revisit what files are in the startup process.
I'm now ecstatic to note that the PROBLEM IS SOLVED!!! YEAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Although I thought I'd turned over every rock on just about every tech site, including Microsloth, I did one more desperation google and found this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812133/EN-US/

Indeed the whole problem was a bad excel.xlb file, which is where the custom toolbar settings are stored. It was corrupted and nothing works if this is the case.

WHEW.. what a proverbail pain in the @$$ this was.