xls open file problem

[bcml swiftdsl com au]

Greetings,
I have a file which is quite large ( 9.7 MB ) which is part of a legacy 
system (soon being replaced by a custom written app with db backend) 
which upon opening does not display any data at all.

If it helps at all:
1. The file does still contain the data (less datafile.xls) AFAICS
2. Gnumeric usually takes a little while to load the file, but now it 
takes only a few seconds.
3. The spreadsheet tab names are loaded (but not the data in them)
4. Yesterday the file seemed to *save* OK, but today it doesn't load.
5. I have tried to load the file on two different computers (one running 
Gnumeric 1.2.12 (which the file was also last saved on) and the other 
Gnumeric 1.4.3. Both computers run different Linux distro's & kernels.

Is there any hard coded upper limit to the amount of data one can store 
in a an xls file, or indeed for that matter an hard limit to what 
gnumeric will read from a file?

I would *really* appreciate any assistance anybody can give :-)

Thanks,
Brett