Shaded cells changing color for no reason

[VA]

My setup:
Dell Latitude D610 Laptop
Windows XP Professional SP 1
Excel 2003 SP1

Problem:
Spreadsheet A has some shaded cells (different shades of blue).
If I open another spreadsheet, say B, within the same instance of Excel, and
toggle back to the spreadsheet A, the cells in A have changed color all by
themselves! This is driving me nuts!

This only happens with certain spreadsheet Bs. Not all spreadsheets will
cause the cells in spreadsheet A to change color.

The two spreadsheets are completely independent, they do not link to each
other. This is driving me crazy. If I print spreadsheet A, the colors come
out as I expect. If I print the same spreadsheet after the weird color
change, the colors in the printout come out weird as well. So it's not just
a color display thing, even the data sent to the printer indicated that those
cells have changed color.

Any ideas why this is happening?

 

[Barb Reinhardt]

Have you checked to see if those cells have a conditional format? Go to
Format -> Conditional Formatting.

 

[VA]

The cells do not have a conditional format. This color change also effects
the color of the worksheet tabs (I colored those also). You can't
conditionally format worksheet tabs.

 

[Quaoar]

My setup:
Dell Latitude D610 Laptop
Windows XP Professional SP 1
Excel 2003 SP1

Problem:
Spreadsheet A has some shaded cells (different shades of blue).
If I open another spreadsheet, say B, within the same instance of
Excel, and toggle back to the spreadsheet A, the cells in A have
changed color all by themselves! This is driving me nuts!

This only happens with certain spreadsheet Bs. Not all spreadsheets
will cause the cells in spreadsheet A to change color.

The two spreadsheets are completely independent, they do not link to
each other. This is driving me crazy. If I print spreadsheet A, the
colors come out as I expect. If I print the same spreadsheet after
the weird color change, the colors in the printout come out weird as
well. So it's not just a color display thing, even the data sent to
the printer indicated that those cells have changed color.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Dirty system: run disk cleanup, then defrag. Try again.

Q