That is certainly an option, although the repair you tried should have been similar.

NOTE:  If you use Office Outlook make sure you save your outlook.pst file to a safe place as it contains all your contact and email information and would be replaced by a virgin (empty) Outlook .pst file when you reinstall Office.

You will find it in C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

(if you don't see that, in folder options, view tab, check show hidden files and folders, click apply, OK)

Personally, I would first try system restore to a restore point before you updated Dragon Naturally speaking. If Excel then works, you can reinstall the Dragoon update.

Does Excel start if you go start it in its safe mode (/s switch)?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291288

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA101580301033.aspx

Are your Windows XP and Office 2002/XP fully updated?

Thanks for the response.  No, it doesn't start in safe mode.  Yes, I do have all the updates for XP and Office XP.  I think the problem happened when I downloaded an update for Dragon Naturally Speaking and while that was running, I tried to open an Excel spreadsheet.  I tried the detect and repair and that didn't work.  Do I need to delete Office and reload the whole thing?

Okay.  No change in system restore going back to late January, so that is out.  I am now starting to wonder if it is an issue with XP?  And it just affects Excel?  Should I do a detect and repair on XP?  I could also try uninstalling Dragon.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Office and that didn't change anything.  I went back 1.5 months on system restore and it said no changes were detected, so I am going to see if I can go back further.  Otherwise, I am stumped, unless something in the Dragon update is interacting with a common file for Excel?

It does seem that whatever happened during the dragion update corrupted some system file.

You could click start/run, type sfc /scannow, click OK. (it may ask for your XP CD). That should check for and replace any missing ot corrupted system files. It does not provide any information, just a progress bar,

Or, in Windows explorer right click your system drive (usually C), click properties, tools tab, click check now , tick automatically fix system file errors, click start. Click yes on the message and restart your PC. Chkdsk will run before Windows loads, may take a while. (you can also chewck the second box scan for bad sectors, but that will take a very long time if your OS partition is large). After your PC has restarted, you can look in Event viewer, application for an event with Winlogon in the Source column, double click on it to show the details.

If that does not work, I would uninstall Dragon and if that fails, you could try a repair reinstall of XP. That should not affect your data, installed apps, etc., though you will need to update XP after it is done. If you decide instead to do a clean reinstall of XP, that would involve a complete reformat of your C partition so all installed apps and data on that partition, so make sure that you have safely backed up everything you will need for reinstallation of apps, as well as all your data, favorites, etc. etc.

Read carefully:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm#warning1

 If your XP CD has an earlier version of Windows than what is on your PC (i.e. the CD has XP SP2, but your version is SP3) you might get a message when you try to boot from your XP CD and I would advise that you first make a new XP CD with SP3 slipstreamed into the version on your current CD. You can use autostreamer as suggested in the above link or (my preference) use nlite to do the slipstreaming for you. It creates an .iso image that you can burn to a blank CD (I assume you have a CD burner).

Get SP3 package from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B33B5A8-5E76-401F-BE08-1E1555D4F3D4&displaylang=en

nlite from

http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

You may also find it useful to collect all the post SP3 XP updates and saving those on a CD for easier updating after the repair install, using autopatcher:

http://www.autopatcher.com/

Good luck.

OK, thanks.

My computer came with XP Pro and Update 1, so I would have to do update 2 and then update 3.

SP3 includes SP2, so no need to do both.

From the SP3 download page:

System Requirements

BTW ignore what it says on the SP3 download page about using Windows update if updating one computer: you want the full pack for slipstreaming.

Thanks for all the input.  I had not been in the event log before and that was a revelation.  It appears the problem is the kernel32.dll file.  It also appears that the problem started during the install of Dragon update.  I am heading out of town and may not get back to this until next week sometime.  Like I said, the only program affected right now is Excel, although the event log shows the error as Windows 10.  I will repost when I have time to work on this at length.