Excel files not opening from Explorer

[rustybucket]

Good afternoon all, I've trawled the internet for a long time and not found a solution to this, so any help is greatly appreciated.

I'm a new VBA user, and have been trying to develop a complex macro to automate a process. Because I have been working on this for so long, I used Personal.xlsb in my XLSTART folder to ease the use of macros.

However, recently this has stopped me from opening Excel files from Windows Explorer (double-clicking a file in My Documents, for example), as it would only open the Personal.xlsb file, and not the double-clicked file. If I had an Excel file already open, and tried to open a second window, I would get the dreaded "Personal.xlsb is locked for editing" error message.

So this left me without the feature to open Excel files from Windows Explorer - a major pain. Because of this I decided to copy my macros out to a text file and delete the Personal.xlsb file, as well as any other file in the XLSTART folder. In my mind this should have brought me back to my position before I created the Personal.xlsb file.

However, this doesn't seem to be the case:
- If I open the Excel program then it comes up with a blank new worksheet, which is what I had expected.
- If I open a .xlsm file from Explorer, then it opens as usual.
- If I open a .xlsx or .xls file from Explorer, then it opens Excel but without any sheets open, and no sign of my file.

Excel still works as usual if I open a file from the Open tool in Excel, or if I drag a file from Explorer into Excel, but this is a lot slower and less intuitive.

For clarity, the XLSTART folder is definitely empty.

I would strongly appreciate any help that you could give me.

[Izandol]

Did you yet try to repair Office from the control panel? This will often repair registry problem like this.

[rustybucket]

Thanks for the reply Izandol.

No, I haven't tried this yet, though I'm on a company laptop with restricted access, so I'll have to escalate it.