JMMach wrote...
>I have not yet acted on your suggestion to copy and then delete, to see what
>difference that makes.
>But the real question is: Why is one box (Workstation) able to do it in less
>than 2 minutes, and another box (identical hardware, Win2K SP4 and
>Office2000) takes 15-20 minutes to do the same operation?
....

The only two purely hardware reason I can think of that two supposedly
identical PCs would take greatly differring time for the same task
would be flaky RAM in one machine that Windows has detected but not
reported that might lead to using virtual memory or a faulty cache on
the slower machine.

Far more likely is that the two machines aren't actually identical in
what software, especially background services, they're running in
addition to running Excel. Overly intrusive antivirus software or so
many background services running that Excel needs to page virtual
memory would be suspects on the slower machines. Spyware/adware could
also be a culprit.