Joseph,

Just a quick thought. Is there something you are doing with Excel that
cannot be done with the Office Web Components? I haven't tested in a full
production environment yet, but I have an early beta web app running server
side under .net 2 that hooks to OWC and it seems to be fairly stable.

Robin Hammond
www.enhanceddatasystems.com

"Joseph Geretz" wrote in message
...
I'm trying to use Excel as an automation server form within my own
application, but I'm finding it very difficult to keep my own instance of
Excel isolated from the user's general Excel environment. I've found the
basic setting 'Ignore other Applications' (I forget the programmatic
property, and I don't have my code in front of me right now) which keeps
my copy of Excel isolated form any Workbooks / Excel instances that the
user may open from the windows shell. However this does have a rather
nasty side effect - it prevents workbooks from being opened by simply
double-clicking them from the windows shell. Presumably, by directing
Excel to ignore DDE requests (DDE - and this is 2006 :-\ ) it sets up
Excel to ignore DDE requests from the windows shell.

What the @$##$^% has Microsoft done here? How can Excel be taken seriously
as an automation server, if we can't create an isolated instance which
doesn't wack out and doesn't get wacked out by other instances of Excel??
This is Windows after all. The OS which is suppoed to support more than
one thing going on at any given time.

Thanks for any guidance which you can provide.

- Joe Geretz -