.xls refresh all keeps enabling itself?

[Smeghead]

I have a report (.xlsx) with some data connections to a SQL query that sometimes crashes on certain people's PCs. They seem to get better reliability from .xls files, however some of the queries are quite expensive and take a while to run, and I'd prefer to disable the background refresh and refreshing with Refresh All on these queries, which I have done in the xlsx, but when I save it as an xls, the Refresh All option always ticks itself again after closing and re-opening the file. Is this not changeable in xls files?