Excel 2003...

Recently, each time I shut down Excel it asked me if I wanted to save
changes to Personal.XLS. Trouble was, I hadn't done anything to
Personal.xls! It would happen even if I just opened Excel and closed it
without doing anything at all. Finally I answered 'Yes' just to make the
message go away, and it did.

How can "changes" be held in abeyance *in between* Excel sessions?! Maybe
the some feature of Auto-recovery which was carrying forward session by
session until I dispensed with the recovered version or else allowed it to
save over the pre-existing version?

Also, some time ago I turned off Save AutoRecover Info. Well, thereafter I
had a crash ... and sure enough, on restarting Excel, I was asked what I
wanted to do with certain files. I assumed these were files open at the time
Excel crashed, but now I am wondering if they were files that had been being
kept up until that point in time? ... Like, did turning off 'Save
AutoRecover Info' maybe put them into suspended animation, awaiting the next
crash? Seems wierd, really. If there is a write-up on Autorecover, I would
like to read about it, thanks. Seems worth understanding completely.

Any ideas without bending anyone's brain too far?