Hi

if you're reading from & writing directly to a floppy disk then the most
likely explaination is that the file is corrupt.

doing a quick google search (groups.google.com) turns up a few ideas on how
to maybe recover data - these ideas are from a post by Ken Wright back in
2003:
----
.... Excel 2002 is quite good at recovering data from Corrupt files -
Just open the file in Excel 2002 and it will do the rest.


Failing that you can always try to drag data out of the file without opening
it using the full file path in a link to a blank workbook, eg:-



='C:\My Documents\Excel\[Corrupt File Name.xls]Sheet'1!A1---

hope this helps

Cheers
JulieD

"Firemedic395" wrote in message
...
I have an excel spreadsheet that was created and saved to the A: drive (3.5
floppy). It has been opened and updated several times without a problem,
now
all of a sudden, it lags to open and then i get an error stating it cant
be
opened and my be a read only file. Why all of a sudden is this file unable
to
be opened?