The following is not a solution; rather thoughts and suggestions as I'm unable to replicate your environment.

I was originally going to suggest that an alternative might be Spreadsheet::XLSX which the documentation describes as: "Perl extension for reading MS Excel 2007 files".

However, I noticed your perl -V output has "... perl5 (5.0 patchlevel 5 subversion 03) ... Compiled at Nov 2 1999 ...". As Spreadsheet::XLSX source code has use 5.006000;, you won't be able to use this with your current (12-year old) version of Perl.

This led me to thinking that there might be some some incompatibility between your 1999 Perl and 2007 Excel. If you add use warnings; (after use strict;), you may get some output indicating such a problem.

While I appreciate that upgrading Perl will not be a trivial task, I would recommend you look at doing so.

P.S. For future reference, the perl -V output would have been much easier to read if wrapped in <code>...</code> tags.

-- Ken

In reply to Re: MS Excel 2007 never dies - or at least the process wont by kcott
in thread MS Excel 2007 never dies - or at least the process wont by otism

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