I changed the cron setup to use cygserver as Corinna suggested. I used cron-config and cygserver-config to setup the cron and cygserver services and passwd -R to establish my password. Normal cron jobs run under this setup but Excel still hangs as it did before. I also tried this on the Win7 PC that I thought worked at one time but it behaved the same with Excel hanging.
So it looks like Corinna's first case is the situation - there is no solution. There apparently is something unique about Excel that will not run in this Win7 cron environment. Denis --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Corinna Write: Two possible solutions come to mind: - Either there is no solution. The reason might be that Excel is expecting a GUI it can't connect to. - Or it's about the user token after switching the user context. I assume you're running Excel from cron as some other user account than cyg_server. Please read https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-setuid-overview and try https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-nopasswd3 Corinna -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple