Thanks for the useful tips.
I think I found it. After removing Adobe PDFWriter and its office
macro's the problem disappeared. Probably one of these automatic updates
by Adobe has introduced the problem a week ago. Now Excel starts up in a
quarter of the time and shuts down in a tenth of what it used to do.
PDFCreator is nicer anyway without all the macro klimbim. So I am
happily waiting for the next mysterious problem.

Janwillem van Dijk wrote:
As of recently my word and excel consistently crash on close. If I open
excel or word without opening the VBE the procrams close fine. If I had
the VBE active, however, I get something like "instruction .....
referenced at memory .... could not be read".

This happens even when I do no editing whatsoever, just start excel
press Alt-F11, close VBE (no problem), save workbook (no problem), close
excel and than the error appears. Every thing seems OK except that
changes made to options et cetra are not saved.

What could be the problem??

Office 2000, Win2k, Panda daily updated automatically and virus check
OK, MS Antispyware active and OK, no add-inns loaded, no special startup
files.

Thanks for the help,
Janwillem