While doing a VLOOKUP, the auto-save locks up Excel
 

I am doing a VLOOKUP in Excel 2007, I am looking up 6 cells across by about
5,000 cells down, or a total of 30,000 cells. The lookup function went OK,
but now Excel is trying to autosave the file and is locked up because of the
external link values. In Office 2003, the same problem would occur, but the
difference was that Excel 2003 would throw an error dialog box up that stated
that the external link values would not be saved. Therefore it would not lock
itself up. I've been waiting about 20 minutes now.

I don't know if the program has changed to attempt to attempt a full save of
the external link values, or if MS took out the instructions to throw the
error....

Any ideas?