David,
Thanks - every little bit helps!

>Terry,
>
>>What was the funky state? How did you fix it?
>
>I talked about it in my second reply to Tamar yesterday. Since the last thing I'd done was to set a cell's value before closing the workbook and quitting Excel. I think Excel hadn't really committed the data in the last cell. So I asked it to return the current value of another cell before closing and quitting. And now it works.