Excel 2002 Add-In not loading when the application opens

Question

Good afternoon,

I created an Excel .xla addin for Excel 2002. This weird behavior I am seeing from it happens only on my machine, but not on my coworkers. I would like to understand why.

The add-in has a UDF function that gets called from many, many spreadsheets.

• My Add-in is set to open when Excel opens. When I open a blank spreadsheet it works fine.

• If I double-click on an .XLS that references the add-in, Excel fails to load the VBA project, and I get #NAME!. However, if I open Excel and then the spreadsheet, it works fine.

I've checked the blacklist "disabled items" under the help menu. There's nothing there. This has been working for a long time now; I can't find out what changed. I've tried nuking all Registry entries with my add-in's name and trying again. Still doesn't work.

Any ideas? Thanks. -Alan.

Answer 1

Eventually I figured out that all the problematic spreadsheets had RTD/DDE links in them, and it turns out that the data source process is never really running on my machine. As soon as I went to Edit-Links and removed those links everything worked fine.