WHen i was on 98SE - when i opened up multiple excel files only one program of excel would be opened in my taskbar at the bottom. since i upgraded to XP - now if i open like 5 excel documents it opens 5 excels in my taskbar. any way to fix this?

It's supposed to be like this- it's actually a feature introduced with MS office 2000 which they stole from Apple. I quite like it. There may be some way to prevent it but why would you want to if nothing is wrong?

I dont like things cluttering my task bar and only want it to show 1 excel - like when I'm checking or Oracle logs and open up 200 notepad documents at once - it doesn't open 200 notepads - just one wiht layers. however excel will open 200 seperate programs - it gets annoying.

Well actually if 'opening 200 notepads' means hitting 'new' 200 times then no it won't. However XP has a 'grouping feature which you may want to check out, perhaps even with notepad: create a shortcut to notepad.exe or use the one on your start menu. Now click on it, click again, and again. bet you can't make it to ten instances simultaneously before xp groups them. Still feel cluttered? Most base apps and office will do this in xp, some, e.g. adobe photoshop won't