Hi George,
You're right about oword.quit taking care of it, when the application closes Word, it IS gone. The problem is when the user closes it. Are you saying that oword.quit() or oword=null should be added somewhere else? And one more strange thing...I tried playing around with different things and wondered what would happen if i worked with the Winword "phantom" . I used your is_run32() on it and It Returns 0 so it doesn't think it's running (?) In one instance it thinks it's running, in another it doesn't? There's no other way to remove it from the list?

And Nancy, thanks for your input. I'll work with getobject(). I'll try anything. :-)

>>Hi George,
>>I do have it looking for 'Microsoft Word', and like I said, it works fine, but if I (the user) closes Word by clicking the top right check box, for example, Word seems to close, but in the task list, 'Winword' is listed. The next time I try to open a Word file, it acts like it found 'Microsoft Word' with your procedure and doesn't issue another oword=create("word.application"), but when it skips the create command and goes directly to the with endwith oword commands, it doesn't recognize oword as being Word. follow me? So Strange.
>>Is there a command to close that 'Winword' that is listed? To get it out of there? I don't really understand your last suggestion as I'm quite new at this stuff. Thanks so much.
>
>Mary Ann,
>
>Probably issuing oWord.Quit() plus oWord = NULL. The trick is going to be determining what's a server reference and what isn't. If 'winword' is hanging around without a visible reference, the user has quit. What's keeping that around is VFP. Once the above is issued, the reference should go away.
>
>Let me know if this does it, please.
>
>With my problem, however, the above doesn't work, apparently because the FOR EACH to iterate the cell range in Excel doesn't properly release the reference. The only way out with that is that you have to issue CLEAR ALL or QUIT, neither of which is desirable.