I have been documenting many issues that I have resolved as of late. I have one more to write about when I am done with this post 
A ticket was escalated to 2nd level support, which is my team, where a customer was having issues with a button on a website that says “Export to Excel”. When the customer clicked on the export button, a new IE window appears and then instantly closes on its own as if nothing happened. Exporting to Adobe PDF works just fine, but when trying to export from this website to any Microsoft Office application such as Excel or Word nothing would work. Excel and Word worked just fine when opening each application on their own.
I cleaned out all of the temporary files on the computer manually, deleted everything in C:\Windows\Prefetch, and even upgraded his IE version to 8 (this is a Windows XP computer). There were NO other issues with this computer. So I was at a loss….
But then, I found this blog entry at Microsoft’s ASP.NET site about “[How to make Export To Excel always open in a new Excel window](http://When the customer clicked on the export link, a new IE window appears and then instantly closes on its own as if nothing happened.)
1. Go to Windows Explorer.
2. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click on the File Types tab.
3. From the Registered file types list box, select the XLS extension, and then click Advanced.
4. In the Edit File Type dialog box, set the Confirm open after download to selected.
5. Make sure the Browse in same window option is not selected, and then click OK.
This permanently resolved the issue. Now, when the customer clicks on the link to export, Excel opens up in a new window and automatically populates the data in the new spreadsheet as if opening from the website!
Case closed.