Bob: It could just mean you need your hard drive cleaned, which can cause
misreporting and problems like yours:
http://www.officearticles.com/misc/how_to_clean_up_your_hard_drive.htm
It could mean that your file is or is becoming corrupt, and may need an
overhaul:
http://www.officearticles.com/excel/troubleshoot_your_workbook_in_microsoft_excel.htm
As for opening Excel without a workbook, it's not designed to open without
one. You could easily emulate it by opening Excel, hide book1 and close
Excel. When it says "Do you want to save...?" say yes to save the hiding of
book1. Otherwise, it MAY require code to open Excel without that workbook.
Is there some reason you don't just double-click one of your file icons to
open Excel?
****************************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com
****************************

Anne, thank you for your link. You are practical and pragmatic there.

Boblink I have virtually the identical affliction.  It's been a
problem for a long time, and cost countless money and loss of lives
while MS has waxed impotently about it.  I hope the Excel development
team sleeps well at night while this problem has existed for years.

In my case the crash happens at different times.  I can open the file
and run the macro and have it crash the app. when 25% done; I can then
do EXACTLY the same thing and have it make it 55% of the way through.
I also have 1 Gig memory, which I am certain is not stressed outside
of Excel; and the .XLS is a single MEG.  I thank the people who offer
well-meant responses of "you're short on memory.  Try closing
Outlook."  That's simply not the issue here.

Successive *pastes* appears to be the crux of the problem.  One
tactical response is to add
Application.CutCopyMode = False
after pastes.  This may help others; it didn't solve things for me,
but it apparently transformed the crashes to new mutations and new
timings.  In the many hours I've bled researching this, over and over
I hear that pastes are flaky.

I have had vomitously choppy "success" from subdivide/conquer.  To
illustrate: I have 1650 total values to calculate.  550 are displayed
on each page.  There are 11 columns of 50 values each.  If I divide
the problem into 33 tasks and manually run the macro 33 times, maybe 7
times out of 10 I can make it to the goal line, whereas I crash 100%
of the time if I run a single loop.  Imagine the conversations I've
had with the company CEO.  He says, "What do you mean, you simpleton?
You can't write a loop? Isn't that what I learned to do in BASIC 35
years ago??"

Divide and conquer is the only spitball I've found against this
Goliath.