This is a predictable failure of backward compatibility dressed up as a repair attempt, and it is exactly the kind of friction that should not exist in a tool you trust with years of work. The user's file opens fine in Excel 2010 and 2015, yet Excel 2024 declares it damaged, then tries to recover it by gutting the very drawing layer that may hold annotations, diagrams, or formatting the user carefully built. That is not a fix. It is a forced migration dressed in error messages.
What this means for you is practical and frustrating: the file is not corrupt. The archive is intact. The problem is that Excel 2024 has changed how it interprets the internal structure of old files, specifically the `/xl/drawings/drawing1.xml` component. When the user tried the standard workaround, renaming the file to .zip and removing that XML file, the archive itself became unopenable. That suggests the file was already at the edge of what the newer format tolerates, and the manual edit pushed it past that edge. The real lesson is that the error is a compatibility gate, not a data loss event, but the official tools offer no way to pass through it cleanly.
We think Microsoft should be transparent about this. If a file opens in three consecutive older versions but fails in the newest, the burden is on the software to explain why, not to ask if you want to "recover" something that was never broken. The user did the right thing by testing across versions. The software did not meet them halfway. For anyone facing this, the safest path is to open the file in an older version, strip or simplify any drawing objects, and save a clean copy before upgrading. That is manual work no one should need to do, but it is the only reliable workaround until the tooling catches up.
Do not treat this as an isolated glitch. It is a signal that your data's portability is narrowing, not widening, with each new release. Keep copies in the format that works, and test your critical files before committing to a new version. The spreadsheet should serve you, not the other way around.