After some digging, I pieced together the following solution. The vbs code below will force taskkill any outstanding excel.exe processes, and then opens the stated excel file (from which vba code can be restarted automatically from a worksheet_open event).
1) Turn off Windows error reporting: Start, search 'Problem Reports and Solutions', change settings, advanced settings, Turn off problem reporting
2) Disable auto recovery for excel: Within the WB in question, click; file, options, save, disable file recovery for this WB only
3) Under windows event viewer, application logs, highlight the error (faulting excel app) , right click 'create a basic task', run application/script, and enter the chosen name of the file in 4).
4) Paste the following code into text file and save as a vbScript file (.vbs)
Option Explicit
KillProcesses
ExcelRestart
Sub ExcelRestart()
Dim xlApp
Dim xlBook
Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
xlApp.DisplayAlerts = False
Set xlBook = xlApp.Workbooks.Open("C:\...\test.xlsx")
xlApp.visible = True
xlBook.activate
Set xlBook = Nothing
Set xlApp = Nothing
End sub
Sub KillProcesses
On error resume next
Dim objWMIService, WshShell
Dim proc, procList
Dim strComputer, strCommand
strCommand = "taskkill /F /IM excel.exe"
strComputer = "."
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:"& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\"& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set procList = objWMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name = 'excel.exe'")
For Each proc In procList
WshShell.run strCommand, 0, TRUE
Next
End sub