Conditional formatting different on XL2007 than XL2003
 

I thought I had posted this yesterday, but I cannot locate it on the site.
If this is a duplicate, I apologize for doing that.

I have encountered a difference in the behavior of XL2007 (fully patched) as
compared to XL2003, as pertains to conditional formatting and I am wondering
if others have seen the same behavior. This is the situation.

I have a 1400 row spreadsheet (XL2007) in which I want to apply conditional
colors based on the value of the current cell and another cell on the same
row. I am using this conditional formatting rule that is defined for cell N3:
[Formula is] =AND($N3="",$AL3="") and then choose a fill color if true.

This works fine and I can use the format painter to copy the conditional
formatting rule to the next row and that does what is expected, namely I get
=AND($N4="",$AL4=""). As long as I apply the format painter to just one row
at a time, it works fine.

Since I have 1400 rows, I need to do this to all the cells in range
N4:N1400. When I select these cells and apply the format painter to the whole
selected range, every cell in the column ends up referencing row 4 rather
than its own row. If I use the format painter to copy the whole rows format
to subsequent rows, it has the same undesirable behavior.

I copied the spreadsheet as an XLS file to a system with XL2003 and tried it
there. On XL2003, it does just what I would want, namely every row references
itself.

Do others see the same behavior? Is this a bug or a feature? Is there a fix,
short of using an XL2003 system?