Hello World,
Newbie here and i'm sure everyone is laughing at the ancient software mentioned in the title. I'm laughing too!

Current situation: running a Win7 64 bit Dell i7 laptop that is behaving nicely and have an older Dell laptop that is running XP (totally off line). I kept the XP box alive to do occasional VB6 coding to maintain an unrelated (to this problem) system. Excel 2003 is installed on both boxes and seems (or at least seemed [past tense]) to work just fine on the Win7 box, as well as the XP box.

So now I'm interested in doing some automated trading with my brokerage firm and they have an API program. The APIs can be built from ground up in several languages or one can go the Excel route and there are a couple of alternatives (DDE and ActiveX) distinguished mostly by their method of connecting to the server software. The brokerage firm has distributed simple example files and libraries of pre-written objects for all of the language possibilities, including Excel. So I have a sample DDE spreadsheet and a sample ActiveX spreadsheet, again mostly differentiated by their method of connecting to the server.

Now I find that, after thinking that 2003 was totally compatible with Win7, an xls file that is heavily coded with VBA does not appear to be compatible and definitely is not functioning properly. On the XP box, the launch of these samples (individually, of course) will trigger the warning and option to disable or enable the macros - just as expected. The same launch on the Win7 box never sees this warning. So things are different between the two. With regard to the Win7 box, it's 64 bit computing running a 32 bit program. Compared to 32 bit computing running a 32 bit program, one shouldn't be surprised seeing differences.

Options:
1. upgrade the Win7 box to a more current, 64 bit version of Excel and hope that solves all of the sample file problems. Being a Luddite, I'm resistant because I really like the old style 2003 and I know I'll never use the horsepower of a later version.
2. pull off a magical dual installation on the Win7 box and use the later version for only these heavily coded sampe files, which will be substantially altered in the end but which will still be heavily coded. A dual installation sounds like a lot of bloating!
3. run 2003 in an XP virtual window on the Win7 box. That might require running the brokerage firm client in the XP window as well and, in the end, what sounds easy could get very complicated. Adding XP to the hard drive also sounds like bloating.
4. alter or adjust or configure Win7 or Excel 2003 to act just like XP when it comes to Excel 2003. That's where this forum comes in - anybody got any ideas??

My apologies for the long post - I thought it best to be as precise as possible.

I thank all who read and/or respond in advance.
Cheers,
Larry