Microsoft Excel Error: "There was a problem sending the command to the program."

For the last three years or more, I’ve been living with a little annoyance with Microsoft Excel.  It’s one of those things that’s just not quite annoying enough to get to the bottom of, and I figured it was some obscure registry setting I’d never find and must be something odd about my laptop setup…

“Cannot get the list schema column property from the SharePoint list” Error with Excel 2003

This seems to be a fairly widespread issue with no clear solution.  It occurs when the user chooses the ‘Export to Spreadsheet’ Action and the SharePoint list view has a Date/Time column displayed.  With Excel 2007, the data is exported to Excel just fine, but with Excel 2003, the above error is shown in a…