Excel keeps outdated interface of an ActiveX component

[cbra]

Hi,

I wrote a little ActiveX Component which worked quite well in excel (visualizing some data). However today i removed some Properties of the Control which are not longer needed. Everything went well, since the AxTestcontainer doesn't show the Properties and set/get methods anymore.
The Problem is Excel seems to hold some Kind of own Record of the Interface: the old Properties are still there !
and even worse: if you edit one of them an other property changes. Some Properties don't even work anymore (Runtime Error 13: Type Mismatch). Seems like the interface definition or typelib excel uses is completly outdated.

I tried to clean out the whole registry (searching for class name and every GUID that is used by the controll) , but the problem persists.
Does anybody know something about this behavior ? How can i clean this mess up ?

thx
CBRA

 

[cbra]

Ok, after some searching on Microsoft.com i found out the source of the Problem:

Excel does indeed some caching of the Interface of ActiveX Components. But it isn't in the *.xls files. The caching happens system wide in a temp directory. Microsoft states that WINDOWS/Temp/Excel%VERSION% is used but for me it was "Documents and Settings/%USERNAME%/Local Settings/Temp/Excel%VERSION%" (translated from German, maybe not exact). However the interface information is held in files called *.exd which can safely be deleted (its a Temp-Dir so whatever).

be carful ! if you delete them:
<quote>
you may notice a slight decrease in performance the first time
you insert a control
</quote>

;-)

I prefer waiting and working with the right data however (it lasts maybe some ms)...
would be nice if this file would be deleted on unregistering the control.

corresponding microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/158875/EN-US/