Zooming Excel Screen - Long Delay

[WagnerL]

Windows XP Pro SP2
Office 2003
Excel 2003
Computer runs on an Intel Pentium 3GHz, 1GB RAM, >50GB available on HD.

Any Excel page with at least 2 or 3 screens of text (I guess more than 100 rows by 5 or 6 columns).

Changing the ZOOM from 100% to another, or returning from another to 100%, causes the Excel screen image to change immediately to the new zoom factor choosen, BUT, the windows cursor icon changes to hour-glass (meaning something is undergoing) for several seconds, in a 4MB file it may take almost a minute or so.

Opening any Excel file that is carrying the zoom set to a value different from 100%, takes forever to open. That is certain. I made several tests. Any file that opens VERY fast, changing to 120% (for example) causes the hour-glass to takes more than 40 seconds, then saving this file (as 120% of zoom) and reopen it will take almost a minute to complete the opening. Changing to 100% (waiting the 40 seconds hour-glass), saving the file, reopen is immediately.

That is ridiculous.

Office Word has the same function, it works nicely and fast, so it is nothing to do with Office itself, printer driver (I already read on the internet; a bad driver may cause such problem). It has to do with Excel.

Other similar computers at the LAN, same windows, same office, does not present such problem. It is located in just one computer.

I already run the Office "fix errors, or something" from the "Add/Remove Programs, Office, Change" at the Control Panel... causes no change in the problem.

It makes no difference dealing with Excel files located at the HD of this machine or files located at any file server at the LAN.

Any ideas?

 

[WagnerL]

...
I found something.
I don't know why, but some cells that we use to copy for some rows, such as the user's name that repeats along the page, contains not only the user's name, but something else, some about formatting. Even deleting the cell contents or worse, even deleting the whole row, the strange formatting still there. Even if I deleve all the page contents, clicking at the extreme left top corner and clicking DELETE, leaving the whole page empty, saving this page it keeps holding more then 80kBytes of something. There is no way to get rid of this thing. Even after deleting the whole page, resizing (zooming) takes several (many) seconds to complete.

I found what cells are doing this havoc. So I copied all the cells around this problem cells to a fresh new sheet, and entered those cells text manually instead of copying/paste. Problem disappeared.

But still the thing, what is being copied along with those bad cells? May be a virus? some strange thing?

I have this empty sheet (EMPTY) that is more than 80kBytes long (the .xls file), in case someone wants to dig into the hex contents of the file and try to find out what is that...

Oh yes, strange is that this long time to resize still happening only in one computer. That's amazing.

Thank you.