After 2 days of going over this excel.php file I finally found out what is causing this problem. It has to do with the way the php fucntion PARSE_URL works.
For a better understanding of how this function works, refer to the following URL:
us3.php.net/parse_url
$url = 'http://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor';
$myParsedArray = parse_url($url);
In short, that will return this array:
Array
(
[scheme] => http
[host] => hostname
[user] => username
[pass] => password
[path] => /path
[query] => arg=value
[fragment] => anchor
)
So in excel.php in the stream_open function, at line 74:
$this->xlsfilename = $url['host'] . $url['path'];
If for instance you passed it:
"xlsfile://C:/example.xls"
xlsfilename = C/example.xls
Notice the missing : after C
To fix this problem, change line 74 to:
$this->xlsfilename = $url['host'] . ":" . $url['path'];