Maddening Excel Reader performance issue SOLVED!

I've been having issues with the Excel Reader taking minutes or even hours to read certain complex excel files. This has been extremely problematic, because I want to run a daily index on a multi-terabyte project data folder and process new/changed files each night. Often the indexer effectively freezes up when it hits one of these problematic excel files. I have to have a 2nd protocol check each morning, and kill the indexer process if it's still running. I then maintain a list of excel files to ignore. But several times a week my indexer stalls when it finds yet another excel file that can't be read. One solution would be to wrap the excel reader in a subprotocol, and then have that subprotocol throw an error (which I could then capture) if the reading takes more than, say, 30 seconds. But as far as I know, PP does not have the feature of setting a timeout for a subprotocol.

Anyhow, this is all moot, because I have found a solution! To fix the issue, I simply deleted the excel reader and dragged in another one. Then I set my parameters to be the same as before. Instead of taking hours, the file reads in a few seconds. Simply amazing.

My indexer protocol was originally written using a PP 2017 server, and now I'm on PP 2022. So the component added to the protocol has the "2017 settings". What's a real puzzle is that when I drag in a new Excel Reader and compare it to the old one, the GUID is the same. I can find only two differences. Implementation->Shortcut Version is 1 on the 2017 excel reader, and it's 2 on the 2022 excel reader. The only other differences I can see are under the Information tab - Component Local ID & Component Full ID are 0 in the PP 2017 component, and 1 in the PP 2022 component.  

So, if you've got an old protocol running on a new PP server and it's reading excel files really slowly, delete the excel reader and drag in a new one!