>>>It turns out that you are right, much to my surprise. I am not sure, but I don't think that was the case with older Word versions. I checked Excel, and is released automatically.
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>>Now I am surprised as well, because I thought Excel behaves the same as Word
>
>They've always been as different as night and day, and they've both changed many times over the years.

I think M$ never got the time to rewrite Excel from scratch like they did with the rest of Office. So I'd guess it's the only one left in the sack with lots of code written by whoever M$ bought it from.

>Always clean up after yourself. Never assume the other guy will do it for you because HE may change and leave you holding the bag!

In case of Word, you never know if the current version may have one extra dialog which isn't covered with the general setting, and there's no provision for closing it programmatically, because even if code for it may exist, it's not published to COM interface, which always lags behind at least a version or two.