Well, I think everyone will find this interesting. I installed the latest dev version of wine but excel still crashed. I then deleted the .wine directory and reinstalled office 2003 from scratch. Excel came up the first time and I put in the info office usually asks for (Name, Initials, Organization) I then closed excel and opened it again. It crashed. Here's what's interesting. I then deleted the .wine directory again, reinstalled office and opened excel. Now, just on a hunch, when it asked for the name, initials etc. I entered .wine for the name and .wine for the organization. Excel came up and has worked ok ever since. I'm happy it's working but I'm curious to find out why.