To anyone who can help me:

I am using the English version of Excel 2003 (Students' and Teachers'
version), running on a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP Media version (Italian)
installed.

I am encountering difficulties using Combo Boxes and List Boxes I have
designed for a spreadsheet that I use for recording my expenses, bank
transactions and budget.

I have designed a form to make it easy to pick dates, amounts and items from
lists, and transfer the choices made to appropriate cells in the spreadsheet.

However, using a Combo Box or Text Box to enter a figure onto the
spreadsheet often causes the program to "hang". I then have to do
Alt-Ctrl-Del and in the task manager window, terminate the application.

Some time ago when this happened, Microsoft determined that I needed to
update Windows and Excel 2003 and led me to one of their sites to enable me
to update, which I duly did. But the problem persists.

I may say that I originally developed this spreadsheet on Windows 98, using
Excel 97. There were no problems except for my programming mistakes which I
corrected as time went by.

But when I started using the old spreadsheet on my new laptop, error
messages suggesting I needed to have MS Access installed appeared. However,
the Students' and Teachers' version of Office 2003 does not include Access.

As a test, I took my Excel 2003 personal finance spreadsheet to work, where
we have a version of XP Professional (English) installed. It worked perfectly.

So I wonder whether there is a compatibility problem between the Italian
version of the operating system (XP Media) and the English version of Excel
2003.

I'd be most grateful for any advice on this problem.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Ivy