error in Excel: "Compile error in hidden module: <module name>"

[aghuvi]

On one of my desktop I recently upgraded to Office 2003. Installation went fine without any problems and all office apps are working fine, except Excel. Whenever I try starting Excel, it gives me an error message saying “Compile error in hidden module: <module name>”. Though there is no problem working with excel but this error appears everytime I start the same.

Similar I get another error every time while closing it. It says “the "hidden modules" are Autoexec, Autoexecnew & Distmon!” Any idea what are these errors and how can we get rid of the same?

[CoYoTeA]

Well the error “Compile error in hidden module” with excel is very well know and Microsoft has also provided solution for this in their Knowledge base. So don’t worry and just follow the steps provided in the article here http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;307410

[aghuvi]

Jeez! thanks a million and two... Your my MVP too Susan!

It helped me to get rid of those annoying error messages.

[TanZail]

Hey guys, I’m also struggling with the same error message with Excel startup. I followed the KB Article provided above but none of those fixes helped me. During troubleshooting the problem I also noticed that when I opened Excel a new pdfmaker.xls was created in c:\Documents and Settings\<User's Name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\Xlstart. And later when I closed Excel, it got delete itself.

Any idea what is happening?

[Luis S]

Does this problem started after upgrading to Office 2003? Also while updating the same did you also upgrade to Acrobat 6.0.2?

Earlier Acrobat versions don't work well with Office 2003. See http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/317147.html for more information.

[vshori]

Be sure you have downloaded and installed the latest Office service pack from Microsoft.