Shaggy Hiker,
I think the sample you are looking at isn't the one that is slow. I actually have two issues and the one with the Refresh isn't a problem any longer (my dumb coding). It is the one that is about 1000 lines of code that actually manipulates the slow spreadsheet.
That is where I'm trying to convert the macro to VB.net and that is where the timing is so different. It is interesting about the exception handling because I thought that was what I didn't handle but I don't have any crashes so there must not be any exceptions.