A wildly harmless, vanilla piece of code is choking with a %^&*!!! 1004. Looking for almost any wild workaround if this is unsolvable.

The message occurs on a longtime successful personal.xls statement
For Each ctrl In ActiveSheet.DrawingObjects ' FYI, Dim ctrl As Object earlier

FWIW, this new problem appears in Excel 2003 (for the love of God, don't discontinue it, Microsoft) and 2007. The problem arose after a coworker saved the current workbook in 2010 or 2013 and I'm processing that file with my personal.xls macro in 2003 (and 2007). (Excel 2010 and/or Excel 2013 seem to foul up previously unblemished workbooks, especially with cell comments)

In either Excel version, if I highlight ActiveSheet.DrawingObjects and add a Watch, almost every line shows
"<Unable to get the____ property of the DrawingObjects class"

This happens on every worksheet, even blank ones.

It does not happen on a freshly created workbook created in 2003 or 2007.