Jerud,
One thing you may want to try to help with your various apps having forms-persist problems:
One of our most consistent issues is corrupt settings saved from various apps. Now, our company uses excel and other MS apps, but the vast majority of our apps (Avid Media Composer, Adobe Creative Suites, Autodesk Flame and Maya and hundreds of other graphics applications) have problems with their user settings. Between upgrades, updates, etc. these apps, all from various companies, will behave badly. Some show the things you mentioned including inability to same form settings & positions; other show various other oddities in operations which my engineering crew could never duplicate.
A sort of “default fix” was a complete reinstallation of the problematic applications. But, as we found over the years, Un-installers don’t always Un-install everything that was installed. To be honest, many application programmers just write sh**** code and use intstallation apps that are awful. Leftover registry (Windows) settings and files, Unused keys (Mac) or other detritus are almost always left behind to lead to future trouble. I also don’t allow multiple versions of an application on a machine for similiar reasons.
A rule I instituted some time ago was to delete the problematic application’s user-specific settings first. Sometimes these are hard to find since their location isn’t always broadcast by the installation of the app, but they can usually be found in the computer’s user-specific location. Another brute-force fix is to delete the entire User on the Windows or Mac machine and create a new user. Of course, you have to be ready to lose a lot more when you do this and back up specific data when you do so. For us it isn’t that bad because we save all data that isn’t user-specific to local servers. For a home user it may be a bit more difficult.
If there’s anyway you can delete the app-specific settings and reinstall an app, or delete/create your user from scratch, that may fix your issues. 90% of the time, we’ve found that corrupt users settings are the cause of oddites such as this because devs have changed their apps, but missed some error-trapping for existing settings that uses may still have.
A quick & simple test would be to create a new user on your machine (Jerud2) and see if Excel and the other apps behave properly under that user, then badly again under your original user.
