Thanks to all who assisted. What I found was the following;

Starting Excel in safe mode everything started fine, tried to remove the
add-ins and found they came back each time.

In the end I looked for the information to make a cleanish install of excel
by editing the registry. Came back up fine.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Maybe this from Debra Dalgleish's site will help:

http://contextures.com/xlfaqApp.html#AlreadyOpen



Jon Scales wrote:

One of my users is getting this response every time they open an excel sheet?
autosave.xla already open. Then whichever answer excel crashes. Product
being used office 2000 professional.

Thanks

--

Dave Peterson