I have an 2003 Excel spreadsheet that has been successfully used
to collect experimental data from some instrumentation and plot the
results all nice and pretty. The working system is a WinXP that
has not been updated since about 2003.

The application code (VBA) communicates with the instrumentation at the
socket level with mswinsck.ocx.

I am trying to move the spreadsheet to Excel 2007 on a new 32-bit
WinXP laptop with all updates to the OS and Office. The problem
is that there is no mswinsck.ocx. I moved one across to the new
machine, but when I try to drop it on a form, I get a message that
the object is not trusted.

I have Googled and am given to understand that MSWINSCK.OCX has
been banned (presumably for security reasons) by some method
called killbits. I'm not real clear on what that means, and
would rather not go in that directions.

What I need to know is what OCX, DLL, etc... is now the proper
way to communicate at the socket level?

I haven't been able to find this answer on Google. I even went
to a local technical book store. There I found several dead trees
on the topic of VBA in MS Office. None of them discussed sockets.
Is that now something MS is trying to stop? I am not experienced
with MS products and don't follow their product announcements, I
am wondering if their intent is to discourage the use of, or not
support sockets "."

Thanks,
Ray