Creo 8 and Excel issues

[cstarnes]

We have been using Creo 3 with an intensive automation front end built in Excel 2003. It works flawlessly, and is very quick and efficient. The philosophy has been "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".  🙂

It's time to move to a more modern Creo version, and I have version 8 up and running with no issues. The problem is, I can no longer communicate with Excel 2003 at all (using either the old Creo 3 pfclscom.exe, or the new one), and Excel 2016 is horrendously slow...both by itself, or when communicating with Creo 8. 

I really need a way to make Creo 8 talk to Excel 2003 (yes, I know it is older than a lot of the people reading this...but it is also much, much faster than newer versions of Excel in many ways).

Seeing as how Excel 2016 uses the same old VB API, why can't Creo 8 continue to communicate with it?

Does anybody know of any tricks to get around it, or is there a way that PTC could simply provide a backwards compatible API (pfclscom.exe file)?

Thanks for any help.

[cstarnes]

So after a bit (a lot) of testing and trying different things, I discovered that if I open task manager and manually close the pfclscom process before trying to connect to Creo 8, it seems to work...sometimes. Every now and then, Excel still crashes, even if I delete the process first.

So obviously Creo 8 can talk to and work with Excel 2003, but I need to figure out how to make a stable connection.

Below is my connection code. (Variables are global to the worksheet).

Dim oAsynConn As New CCpfcAsyncConnection
Dim oConn As IpfcAsyncConnection
Dim oSession As IpfcBaseSession

Set oConn = oAsynConn.Connect(Null, Null, Null, 5)
Set oSession = oConn.session

[YaroslavSin]

Try to re-register VB API for Creo 8

[cstarnes]

I went through the unregistering/re-registering, env varibles, etc several times.

I finally got it to work, so I know it's possible... but it was very unstable getting there and I haven't had a chance to really pound on it and see if it can be reliable.