Okay, then. Three final useless suggestions before I go to bed. ;^)

1) How about have a (generous) timeout on the operation and assume it failed if you reach it? (Course, then you'd have to kill the job, and "graceful shutdown" is no longer on the menu.)

2) Assuming the problem is a dialog box hanging you up, maybe a perl program that would "notice" new windows on the server and nudge your script if it happens to belong to Excel?

3) Go all out and hook into the debugger hooks (the ones that ask you if you want to debug the application yadda yadda), make a perl module that handles it, post it on CPAN, and reap the glory? ;^D

(I was originally going to give you a different three suggestions. The third one was "Profit", but I couldn't figure out the second one.....)

...roboticus