Rob, thanks for the reply.

I started out on this journey with trying to use the Interop assemblies in an SSIS package, only to find out that there were also issues with running this on 64-bit SQL Server 2005, my production environment.

It looks like one of the programmer/analysts here is going to write a utility that will poll certain folders, open workbooks, refresh and save. Not something I wanted to tackle so I'm glad this need has gotten some attention here in IT R&D. Turns out I wasn't the only one asking for this capability and the other person was able to allocate the resources to do it.

Much as Microsoft integrates products, there are still some holes that we have to plug with some effort.

My only consolation is that there seem to be so many posts about this issue both here and on other forums that they have to do something about it, right?