Excel has caused an error in excel.exe ??????

I have excel 97 running on a windows me machine. Tons of memory, no problem there. Been using the software for months on this machine with no problems.

Suddenly started receiving "excel has caused an error in excel.exe. if you continue to have problems please restart your computer" error out of nowhere. Error comes up when I try to save a file - closing the program and losing all the work. Software works fine until I try to save. Have tried to save in multiple file formats and locations - to no avail.

I reinstalled excel from the office cd. No help. Same message. The only reference I can find in microsoft knowledge base to this problem referrs to excel 2000 and will not work with '97.

Any ideas???? This is really slowing me down! (But then, doesn't microsoft usually do that? ) :-)

Thanks in advance for any help!

Melissa