It is probably related to Excel being open, yes. If Excel is open, we ask Excel to handle the file read. If Excel is closed, EViews does it. (Roughly).
We'll poke around, but in the meantime recommend having Excel closed.
The problem is that it is selecting the "empty model" as the best model in your case for these countries (and in the other cases it is selecting the GUM). But the empty model is non-valid.
You could get around it by using the "noempty" option to not include the empty model.
I tried running default settings, and it seemed to go through every country: %list = @wflookup("dp*") %list = @replace(%list, "DP", "") for %temp {%list} equation tmp_model{%temp}.varsel(method=auto) dp{%temp} @ c dp{%temp}(-1) dp{%temp}(-2) dp{%temp}(-3) dp{%temp}(-4) ...