Not disagreeing with your suggestions, John, they're similar to mine but more organized <s>. But I think his code ran fine in vfp5, I know mine did. I had to use the same contortion since in vfp5

createobject("Excel.Application")

did not work in some machines. In vfp6, the same code ran exactly as his - it did not stay visible as it did in vfp5. OTOH, the createobject("Excel.Application") works fine on all machines now. So, the problem was caused by some change from vfp5 to 6 - one thing stopped working (getobject), and another started working correctly (createobject)...