I've never had this trouble, but maybe this'll work.

Tools|options|Save Tab
gives the location where excel 2002 stores its autorecovery files.
(for me, it's:  C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\)

You may want to look if there's any *.xar (excel AutoRecovery????) files in
there.

I have my autorecovery set for 10 minutes.  Right now I have one file there
called: ~ar51C9.xar.

(This file is hidden.  You may need to change your view in explorer to show
hidden files.)

After I alt-ctrl-delete and killed excel, I reopened excel and was prompted to
see if I wanted to recover that file.  I answered later.

When I looked back, that ~ar51C9.xar file was renamed to: "book2 (version
1).xls".

If I deleted that in windows explorer, the _second_ time (not the first), the
prompt was gone.  (The first time, it looked like excel still saw it somewhere.
I just closed and reopened.)