I've already done what you suggest -- and it works. We keep a copy of
the ChartObject (since we need to retain some information about the
chart that we can access in our Calculate event handler) around in a
collection and we have been deleting these when we delete the charts
programmatically -- no problem there. The problem was cleaning up
these orphaned ChartObjects for charts that were deleted from the UI.
So, I detect that these charts have been deleted during another update
operation, flag them as deleted, and clean them up at that point --
possibly some time after the chart delete from the UI has taken place.
I was just hoping for a clean solution to this in one place -- not two.
I like clean. I just get frustrated sometimes in VBA that you can't
get closer to the metal. Too many years vested in the WinAPI/MFC world
where you can control things a bit more! Thanks for the suggestions.
I may still use the Deactivate code and handle the other special case
by doing the cleanup manually.

Roy