Scott, try taking a look at This topic: Personal Data Providers (Excel) .
In particular, this post near its end. My colleague, Kathy Mahler, was able to get the DAO 3.5 onto a Win2K machine – with an exception.
An old Listserv post talked about the need to manually register dao350.dll. To do that, go to Start - Run (or Cmd or whatever), navigate to the directory where regsvr32.exe exists, and register the dll:
(run) regsvr32 dao350.dll
or possibly:
(run) regsvr32 c:\winnt\System32\Msexcl35.dll (but she didn’t try this one.)
Copying the dll alone did not do the trick for Kathy – but then registering it did!
Anita Craig 
(BOB member since 2002-06-17)