>>Um... versions of Word for which this should work are probably 2007 and later, but I can't know if there are still a few holdouts with 2003 or older.
>
>Well I didn't put much hope in this one, so just to close it, I'll say that "make Word visible minimized" works well enough.

Did you set Application.DisplayAlerts = .F. and then enclose the lines that woud cause the error within a TRY CATCH structure?