That is what I am trying to avoid. Although it seems like the only way.

On another note can you tell how you initialize your OLE call to Word97? I am currently using the following:

oWord = NewObject( "Word.Application" )
oWordDoc = NewObject( "Word.Document" )

The oWord object can be a problem if for some reason Word is already active. Although it would not fail, it would return an invalid object.