Find & replace problems

I've got a spreadsheet that decided today that it just doesn't like me anymore. Can someone help me fix it? I've written a macro that scrapes 4 pages of notes out of my mainframe systems and combines them into 1 big string in excel...then removes all the extra dashes (unused notes fields in our mainframe system have dashes in them) using a find & replace command. So basically it scrapes this info out of the mainframe:

****12/28/06 USG5224 SLA 12/29 OE 1211933 H6 626 657 425-------------------- ********12/28/06 USG5803 ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------


and turns it into this:

****12/28/06 USG5224 SLA 12/29 OE 1211933 H6 626657425********12/28/06 USG5803

I've been using this macro every day for several months now & its never had any problems...but for some reason today it didn't remove the dashes. When I manually use find & replace to remove them by finding all occurences of "-" and replacing them with "", I get an error message that says "Formula is too long." Anybody have any clue what I might have screwed up?