Excel Not Opening Things

For some reason when Xcelsius installs it screws with the Excel options. Specifically double clicking on Excel files NOT opening. Interestingly enough this is a well documented problem. Here's a reference on BOB concerning Xcelsius. Here's another slightly outdated one from a Microsoft blog.

Crystal Reports from a Universe

My current project is to build a universe and a Crystal Report on top of it. Any suggestions? Is this a good idea? Or is it better to rebuild the table structure in Crystal itself? The clients hope is to have a "pixel perfect" report as well as a universe to do some ad hoc reporting on top of it. There should also be a lot of fun OpenDoc calls in this short little project.