Hm. I'm not sure I'll be able to help you. I sometimes suspect that MS Office has just gotten so big, and so sophisticated, that they're no longer able to keep up with the bugs; I have found some odd behaviors from time to time that no one seems willing to explain or to fix. Maybe I'm doing them all an injustice.

And of course we all have our own jobs to perform. But if you care to post your workbook, maybe I'll get curious and see whether I can figure something out. No promises, because your description of how it's behaving is clear enough so I suspect it'll simply do the same thing for me and I won't come up with a brilliant fix. But maybe I'll see something you didn't; that's what a fresh pair of eyes is for, after all.