Situation: big huge Excel VBA project, running in Excel 2003. Tons of code, been running for years. The December 2014 update from Microsoft that broke Active-X controls for everybody, just got installed on my machine, and hey, it broke for me too. Okay, StackOverflow to the rescue, found the solution, and deleted the .EXD files. Reboot.
Small problem: no help.
Partial workaround: I put "buttons" (not "command buttons" -- which are Active-X controls) on the worksheet, and I can start things running with those. Problem: when the VBA code goes to change a cell on the worksheet, it gets an Application Error, as if it isn't allowed to do so. Because this code has run for years & years, I'm pretty certain that it's the December update bug that's killing me here. Plus, the Active-X buttons still do nothing.
Question: what other steps beyond deleting the .EXD files & rebooting, specific to Excel 2003, need to be taken? ("Remove all VBA code, save, and restore the code" is a non-starter; far, far too much code to contemplate that, and how much I'd likely break along the way.)
Thanks for the help!
What ended up working was going back to a restore point from a few weeks ago. Completed the restore, rebooted, removed the two .EXD files (dunno if this mattered; abundance of caution), rebooted again, and when I fired up Excel, things worked as expected -- i.e. as they did before the Windows Update.
This episode has me seriously pondering the risk/reward of EVER allowing Windows Update to run on this particular machine... for all of the risky things that I don't do (opening random Office documents from strangers, for instance), it seems like a lot of the benefits of all the updates are pretty far off into the realm of hypothetical, while the risks of another mess like this are quite clearly NOT just hypothetical.
Leave it to Microsoft to break a program that's running perfectly well, and even 3 months later their "fix" is neither automated nor comprehensive. /venting