Ok, I got there in the end (took me all afternoon and a lot of
determination)

I have done extensive testing and these are my conclusions...

You will get the "infamous" Err -2147417848 "The object has
disconnected from its clients" if you meet the following conditions:
- Your pivot tables share the same cache
- You have Pivot Charts related to the tables on the same sheet.

To resolve this problem, you may either:
- configure your tables so that they have their own cache (no very
efficient)
- Move your charts on a separate sheet.

Hope this helps some of you!

BR & happy debugging!

Olivier

PS: I'll keep the sample files if some of you are interested