Good point, John. But I assume then that you hide the Word object from your users? Unfortunately in my case I need to let them get to the document. So, my problem was exactly the opposite of yours--I could quit word and VFP's olecontrol would be..um...orphaned from it's word instance...

>I have seen this problem also, and it usually had to do with an instance of Word being orphaned. I kill the instance and the problem is gone. To solve this in my apps that subclass word, I instance word in the init of the primary form and never do oword.quit until the form closes. I just set the visible property to .t. or .f. depending on what's going on. I've had no more problems.