I don't know why the form wouldn't be released, maybe because it was called form another form?, I'm sure someone here knows that, but I can suggest an alternative, about a month ago I did a wizard type of application with the traditional Previous, Next buttons, so it was pretty simillar to what you're doing I guess. What I did was to have a controlling form that called the others, it can be a program in your case. Each form was modal so it would be something like

do form form1
do form form2
do form form3

that should work with no problem you can even catch the returned value of each form now that they're modal, in case the user want's to bail out.