When I protect some cells, and turn on 'protect sheet', my spreadsheet seems ok for a few minutes.. then I get a totally unsolicited (meaning i have not touched the keyboard or mouse or anything) popup telling me I'm trying to edit a protected cell. Such popups will occur more and more frequently the more I leave the spreadsheet on, until they come continuously, as soon as I close the previous window.

Interestingly, if this helps anyone, the popup window does NOT look the exact same as when I actually do try to type in a protected cell.. the text is indeed the same "The cell or chart that you are trying to change is protected and therefore read-only. To modify a protected cell... first remove protection....", however the popups which appear appropriately (ie I cause by typing) are in a popup box that is long left-to-right but short top-to-bottom, so all the text only takes 2 rows. The *unsolicited* popups are more squarish, taller but not as wide, so the text takes up 5 rows.

The popups occur whether or not I have selected a locked cell. They still occur even if I disable the ability to select locked cells.

My spreadsheet does have a lot of RTD data coming in (eg bloomberg data), if that matters at all. But that data is coming in constantly (even before popups start to appear), so it doesn't appear to be a problem that the protection complains about an RTD cell updating.

I have no idea right now what is causing this, and can't find any similar problem when searching the web (maybe i'm not using the correct search terms).

I tried as a workaround to use Application.DisplayAlerts = False (though I'd rather not, as that disables other popups that I may want), but it doesn't seem to work on the fly (ie when run from within a normal module). Maybe I have to have it in Private Sub Workbook_open() to work? I will try that later. But still, like I said, I'd rather find the cause to the original problem.. can anyone help?