Tip: A fix for Excel process hanging in memory after exiting excel

From time to time, the Excel process on my machine will remain in memory for a long time after I close Excel.  This will cause Excel add-ins like Smart View and Cube Designer from loading properly.

The culprit is a corrupted Excel15.xlb file that has grown to be a large file size.  On my machine, this file was ~10 MB.  The normal file size is ~10 KB.

Simply go to this location on your Windows machine and rename the file:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\Excel15.xlb

Next time you start Excel, this file will be rebuilt automatically.