> >Try turning off the background printing in Word. > > I hadn't thought of that. I would rather have control returned to my > program while Word prints (It takes about 10-12 seconds to finish up), but > if I must wait to do it, I guess that's the breaks. Thanks, Lister. Another thing: the 10-12 s measurement is... unreliable. In next incarnation, your routine will make something that will print two minutes, thirty pages or whatever. So, I generally think using the timer to exit Word after a while is just deferring the problem. Isn't there any function in Word which could return status "I_am_still_printing_wait_a_while"? Using the timer to check this couple of times and shutdown Word when it says it's shuttable seems to me like a more robust way out.