>What I've done so far is create a subclass WordHelper based on my cObject(Line) subclass that instantiates word and gets created like:

That is exactly what I have done. I found that there were some things I wanted to do, over and over. even if they were one line of VBA, a clean wrapper could be written. If I REALLY need to access the 'Word.application' directly, I have to type the oWord.oInstance reference. Most of the time, I am hitting the same combination of functions repeatedly, so I write a wrapper method.

has worked (so far :)

if there is a better way anyone knows of, I am very interested..