You are probably right, I do not have 97 to test it on, we're on office 2000 here and it all works perfectly, None of our clients have had a problem, if you know that you are sending to people with 97 or earlier then it could be an issue but I cant imagine that being many people these days.

I think that if this became an issue you could (for just those clients) automate excel to open the saved xml and saveas to a new filename, again I havn't tried this but I assume it would then save in native excel format. at very least this would keep the automation and liklihood of crashes to a minimum.