A "Solution"

I have found a temporary solution to my Microsoft Excel woes. I moved Excel 2008 into a folder I labeled "disabled applications" leaving the rest of Office intact. I set my account up things so that Excel 2004 opens on login. This means that if I click on an Excel file it will open in Excel (unless Excel is open already clicking on the file just fails to open anything) and then I instructed Firefox to open downloaded Excel files in Excel 2004. This restores my functionality except I must always have Excel 2004 open or otherwise open it before opening a file. This is all on my laptop. I'm seriously thinking of getting my IT guy to reinstall Office 2008 on my office computer without Excel and get him to reinstall just Excel from Office 2004? Will that work seamlessly? I'll keep my copy of Excel 2004 at work on my own personal external hard-drive in order not to violate the university's licencing issues (they are being audited by Microsoft right now).

The chart problem is not so bad with new charts but it is a total disaster with all charts I previously created in Excel 2004. They just appear as small images in the middle of a big grey area and can't be resized.

I just tried Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program and it also screwed up charts in an old file I opened. So it's not a solution.

P.S.
"Zoom to selection" in Excel 2008 kind of does something similar to "View Sized with Window" in Excel 2004, but I still can't find a way to reshape the the dimensions of the chart created - the grey area on the left and right sides of the chart stays there and covers the extra area of your chart so now you have to scroll backwards and forwards with your mouse to see the whole thing...