I have posted on this in the Word.applications group several times
over several years with no resolution. I am wondering if the MVPs
lurking in the Excel forums have any suggestions for me.

Here's my most recent experience:

Has anyone heard of a fix for the long standing bug where an OLE link
between Word and Excel dies - sometimes permanently, sometimes only
for a minute or two?

I just had a particularly nasty recurrence that probably requires
rebuilding the spreadsheet again as the Excel link in Word is dead and
replaced by a picture of what the displayed area was when the link
died. When the link dies, you get an error message that Excel has had
a problem and must close. Unfortunately, once the link dies, if you
select the object and it comes up as a picture, you cannot recover the
link again. If you just ignore the warning, do nothing and wait a
while, the link often re-connects. I tried to continue, but as
always, The hurrieder I go the behinder I get.

I am actually using Word, and just filling in the blanks in a
spreadsheet window created in word by selecting Insert Excel
Spreadsheet and then typing within the spreadsheet window. I
don't even know where the spreadsheet resides so I can try to recover
it.

This has been a problem since at least Office XP and is no better in
2007. I have had MS work on this for me in both versions many times
over the years and it remains unresolved. All files are local, and on
the same drive/partition. ( on each of the several systems I have had
this problem with ) Memory load, other running programs, and default
printer have no effect on the liklihood of a recurrence. All systems
with this problem are XP - fully patched at the time.

any thoughts?