Per PeteCresswell:

Anybody figured out a way to deal with this gracefully?

I wound up just deleting those rows - passing a couple of
locator/identifier parms to the VB code that created the routine
in the .XLS.

Only tricky part was preserving any border around the data area
if there happened tb a subtotal line at the bottom of said area.

If anybody cares, there's a downloadable sample of a .XLS at
www.wchs59.com/ClickSortSample.xls

Note that the center sheet doesn't have a border at the bottom to
begin with... it's not the click/sort routine that's losing it.
--
PeteCresswell