Recently my Excel crashed and hid itself so there are multiple copies of the same file opened and the old copy overwritten the new copy. Whenever I try to open a file from Explorer, the opened Excel file closes itself and hides in the background! WTF!

Cause

Turns out Microsoft’s turned the preview handler for Excel on by default, and whoever the f***ing guy who programmed this handler chose to do the simple minded thing by simply opening the file in a full Excel limited into the preview pane by the ActiveX control!

Damn. Have they even thought users would normally click on the file in Explorer, which the preview pane opens it in the background when the file is selected/highlighted, just to double click to open it in a full Excel to edit it?!!