toolbar customizations disappear

[Ellen K]

Hi,

Excel 2000 on W2K Pro. Suddenly my toolbar customizations
are gone. I can recreate them, but if I then close Excel
(yes, after saving a workbook) and reopen it, I see them
for a split second and then I'm back to the defaults.

I found the relevant KB articles and I have an Excel.xlb
file under Documents and Settings\[username]\Application
Data\Microsoft\Excel. I tried renaming it to Excel9.xlb,
no joy. I tried deleting it, recreating the
customizations, closing Excel, the file reappears, but on
reopening Excel the customizations display the same
behavior.

How do I fix this?

 

[Jim Rech]

I see them for a split second and then I'm back to the defaults.

A macro is probably running to cause this. Check your XLSTART folders and
move out anything that should not be loading at startup.

 

[Guest]

Nope. The only thing in XLSTART is PERSONAL.XLS, and the
only macros in there are two that I wrote, neither of
which has anything to do with toolbars (except that one of
them is run by a custom button that disappears with all
the other customizations), and neither of which runs on
startup.

 

[Dave Peterson]

How about under Tools|Addins--anything thing there that could be causing the
trouble?

Chip Pearson has some notes to help diagnose this kind of problem at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm


===
And if you start excel in safe mode, does it happen?

close excel
windows start button
run
excel /safe

(This avoids addins/xlstart/toolbars...)

 

[Ellen K.]

Well, I poked around a little, turned out there was a
second XLSTART folder under Program Files\Microsoft
Office\Office. There is an add-in there called
GWXL97.xla, as well as PDFMaker.xla. However, if I
clicked Tools and selected Add-Ins, neither of these
appeared. I do have Acrobat installed and regularly
create PDFs from Excel files.

So... I moved this folder to my desktop, upon which
clicking my former shortcuts to Excel resulted in the
msinstaller starting and trying to "install" Excel from
CD. I made a new shortcut pointing to C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Excel.exe (the old one was
pointing to Microsoft Office 2000 SR-1 Premium, which was
grayed out and therefore could not be changed), opened
Excel using the new shortcut, added a couple of
customizations to the menubar, closed Excel, reopened it
and voilà, the customizations are there.

So thanks for your suggestions.

Anybody know what GWXL97.xla is? Do I have some weird
Excel macro virus or something?

 

[Dave Peterson]

GWXL97.xla is an addin for GroupWise.

I don't use groupwise, but I've seen a lot of posts that complain about a bug
that sometimes affects the excel's close button (top right corner).

 

[Ellen K.]

Actually about a minute after I posted that it occurred to
me to google it and I found that out.

This problem did start when my GroupWise client was
updated from 5.5 to 6.5. My theory is that the upgrade
created the second XLSTART folder and that that was the
cause of the problem.

Anyway, thanks again for suggesting that I check add-ins,
because even though I didn't see any in Excel, that was
the tipoff when I found the extra XLSTART folder.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't use Groupwise, but I don't think it would create an extra XLStart
folder.

On the other hand, if you've upgraded excel (or all of office) through various
versions, you could have multiple XLStart folders.

Excel is smart enough to find all of them, and I'm dumb enough to get confused.

When I did my upgrade, I kept the current versions of my files in each of the
XLStart folders and consolidated them in the "Real" XLStart.

One quick way to find that real one is to start excel
hit alt-f11 (to get to the VBE)
hit ctrl-G (to see the immediate window)
type this and hit enter:
?application.StartupPath

Mine came back with:
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART

I deleted all the other xlstarts (after moving anything important to the real
one)

 

[Dave Peterson]

This was confusing to me:

When I did my upgrade, I kept the current versions of my files in each of the
XLStart folders and consolidated them in the "Real" XLStart.

I meant that I kept a single copy--the most current version and put it in the
real XLStart folder.