>Are you suggesting something like this:

Pretty much, yes. In the similar case I had a class with oWord property and oWord_access() method, which would instantiate it if this.oWord=null, so the code was

for i=1 to alen(aFNames)
   loWord=this.oWord
   loWord.open(aFNames[i])

... word does more stuff here and closes the file in the end...

   if i%100=0
     this.oWord.quit(0)
     this.oWord=null
   endif
endfor

so the 2nd line would fire up this.oWord_access, which would instantiate word if it was just killed, or use the existing instance otherwise.