Excel Issue

I have a computer that is running Windows 98 and has Office 97 on it. The user is mapped to two folders on the network. In the past, she was able to get to the Excel documents on the network that she needed by either double clicking on Network Neighborhood or My Computer. However now when she tries to get to any Excel files through any of these methods, she gets the following error “Cannot find the file ‘X’ (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that allrequired libraries are available.

We can however open the Excel files if we first open Excel.

My question is, what might have caused this issue and what can be done to rectify the situation?

Any thoughts/comments would be much appreciated.