Dave Peterson schrieb:

I think someone wrote a macro that stole the function of what ever you did to
cut or copy.

(If edit|copy failed, try rightclicking on the range and copy. Does that work?)

Chip Pearson has some notes on how to diagnose startup errors at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm

And Jan Karel Pieterse has more notes at:
http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/StartupProblems.htm

Essentially, you move all of the stuff out of XLStart and you turn off all the
addins under Toools|addins.
Dave many thanks for your help.
In the meantime I got help from Smarttools who are Excel and Access
experts. They indetified an addin from Smarttools called Cellspot which
was burried deep in my pc.
Now all is ok.
Once again many thanks

Gerhard