GP Fault If Many Line Continuation Characters in Module

In Microsoft Excel 5.0, you may receive a general protection (GP) fault if you copy and paste lines of code that contain the line-continuation character (_) in a Visual Basic subroutine.

In Microsoft Excel 7.0, you may receive the following error message if you copy and paste lines of code that contain the line-continuation character (_) in a Visual Basic subroutine:

You receive the GP Fault if you copy lines in a Visual Basic procedure that contain line-continuation characters, and paste the lines in a procedure so that there are more than a total of ten consecutive lines joined with line-continuation characters.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the versions of Microsoft Excel listed above. This problem was fixed in Microsoft Excel 97.

To prevent this error from occurring, do not copy and paste lines that end in line-continuation characters if the resulting code will contain more than nine consecutive lines that end with the line-continuation character.

When you enter code in a Visual Basic module in Microsoft Excel, you can use an underscore (_) as a line-continuation character. When you type this character at the end of a line, the next line is appended to the current line when you run the subroutine.

For example, when you run the following code the line is evaluated as if you typed it as follows: Normally, you can type up to nine consecutive lines with line-continuation characters. If you type a tenth consecutive line with a line-continuation character, you will receive the error message and the tenth line-continuation character is automatically removed.

However, when you copy and paste consecutive lines that end in a line- continuation character, you can easily exceed the nine line limit. When you do this, you receive the error message above as expected. Additionally, the screen may be redrawn incorrectly; lines in your procedure may be missing and others may display twice. You may also receive a GP Fault.