I was having random “keyboard freezes” with Excel 2004. For no apparent reason, suddenly input from the keyboard and mouse buttons would be ignored until I would mouse over and click anywhere outside of an Excel window. Then I could click back into the spreadsheet and continue until another freeze.

The fix (so far, so good — I have my fingers crossed) was to uncheck the Excel Edit Preference item “Cut, copy, and sort objects with cells”.

I hope this helps someone else.

Can anyone explain this?