My office just recently converted to Excel 2003 (from 97) - and it seems that
it crashes way more than 2000 or 97. In fact, sometimes I now open files in
97 and save with 97 to make the Excel files smaller and it seems to help out
the crashing issue as well.

And then autorecover always takes over and it just gets in the way. I am in
the habit of saving anything I want to keep before running anything, so it's
just an additional step. I've turned autorecover off - but it appears that
there is also an autorecover associated with the workbook or something - but
it still seems to go into autorecovery mode.

I am a programmer and work exclusively with VBA (mostly Excel) - but it
seems that other people at my office are having similar experiences (with
2003 crashing more), and they work with spreadsheets without any VBA. And
autorecover mode just confuses the issue.

Is there a way to disable autorecover altogether? And why are the files so
much bigger? I'm keeping 97 on my machine just to fix this problem and to
compress files.