When I speak of the shortcut bar, I'm usually talking about the microsoft Office
shortcut bar--that bar that you can autohide and put all your favorite
applications on.
But I don't know of any reason why excel would try to (or even care about)
access this.
There are toolbars within excel. Maybe the file that holds those got corrupted.
You may want to try this:
close excel
windows start button|search (or Find)|*.xlb
(look in hidden folders and for hidden files)
Rename all the ones you find to *.xlbOLD.
Then restart excel.
If it's fixed, delete all those *.xlbOLD files and rebuild any toolbars you've
customized.
If it's not fixed, rename them back to *.xlb.
====
Excel loads workbooks in your XLStart folder and addins checked under
Tools|addins.
You can turn off everything under tools|addins and move everything out of your
XLStart folder. But keep track, you're going to add each back--one at a
time--and start excel after each one.
When you find the problem file, either delete it of move it or keep it
unchecked.
If you know the developer, you may want to go back and tell him/her so that they
can try to fix it.
Chip Pearson has some additional notes to help diagnose this kind of problem at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm