Jeff,
There is a KB article on MSDN that talks about this. Believe it or not it's dependent on how much "pasting" has been done in the spreadsheet. You have two options, 1) save the file as something like CSV from Excel and import that file, 2) use Automation and read the spreadsheet cell by cell from VFP. #1 is a couple of orders of magnitude faster to run.
>I'm trying to append an MS Excel 2000 file into a fox table (VFP 6.0). However, when I endter the command "APPEND FROM 'Sales Ledger.xls' TYPE XLS", FoxPro instantly closes! Does anyone have any ideas on this?