Hi,

This is my first post to a DTN forum. If this is in the wrong forum, my apologies.

I just wanted to let everyone know about a bad experience I have had, in hopes it may help out if you face the same scenario.

Last night I suffered the worst system failure of my entire computing life (over 25 years). I believe the problem rests more in the hands of big brother Microsoft than anyone else, but I will let you all decide for yourself. Here are the facts:

1. I currently use Excel 2003 for DDE work with my data feed.

2. I had IQfeed installed first, but upgraded to DTNIQ for a higher symbol count. (this should have changed nothing according to the powers that be at DTN)

3. I had downloaded and installled the new Office 2007 directly from Microsoft. (60 day trial)

4. During routine work on my DDE Excel app, I double clicked my .xls file (I normally open Excel 2003 first and then use the File Open command). This time the file opened with the new Excel 2007.

5. After a few moments, the file shutdown as my 60 day trial expired. No worries, I was just as happy using the 2003 version, BUT I was not able to reopen the file in 2003 and successfully get DDE services to work. Trying to reopen Excel 2003 itself was slow and laborsome. I would intermittently get messages saying I had a corrupt installation (which would sometime NOT appear) as well as requesters continually popping up asking me to install certain missing files in Ex 2003.

6. My subscription to Mcafee Viruscan was also affected! Weird eh? It showed as expired even though my subscription goes on until May 2007. Got this back working, but strange that all of this happened as a result of the expiration of Office 2007!

After hours of trying to troubleshoot everything I could think of (and I mean everything) I have decided to start from scratch and reformat EVERYTHING and start again. My files are fine. They work on my other machine (with DDE) with no problems but the machine with the expired 2007 trial is toast!

I have never gotten a response from Microsoft about any problems at all, but immediately this morning got an inquisitive response wanting further details. The texture of the message makes me wonder if they have seen this type of problem before. Perhaps the registry settings were simply changed to values incompatible with whatever, but even doing system restores etc. made no difference.

I hope this long boring message helps someone, or at least amuses some of you! Take Care!

Todd