Ken, I solved my problem last week. The cause was quite obscure and you
probably could not have guessed what it was. I uninstalled and reinstalled
Office XP twice to no effect. In KB832671 "Known issues when you install
Office XP SP3", under the topic "How to determine whether the update is
installed", I found the updated versions of the Office program files. When I
checked the versions of my programs, using Help, About...., I found that the
versions of several programs were not up to date! Using Windows Explorer, I
went to the directory of the Office programs Program Files\Microsoft
Office\Office10\ and started each program using the individual exe file. When
I checked the versions of the programs, all were up to date. When I looked
for additional copies of the exe files on my computer, I found three of them
in my Desktop directory, one of them being Access. Of course these files were
never updated. They were put in the Desktop directory about two years ago
when I got this computer and I created shortcuts on my desktop for the Office
programs. I don't understand how the exe files were copied, but I was
probably careless in creating the shortcuts. So three of the icons were
pointing to old exe files. After I carefully cleaned up the short cuts and
started the current version of the program, the Access wizards worked
properly and importing the Excel file was a piece of cake. As you suggested,
I could not import to an existing table, but had to import to a new table.
Then I created an append query and easily appended the data to the existing
table. Thanks for your help.