I am also working on a app that automates Word. I ran across the same problem. My Word automation is driven from a form. I made the Word pointer a public variable, although a form property would be more oops, and in the Destroy event of the form I always check if Word is still running and if so I close it at that time. The user must close to exit the application which will fire the destroy event and release Word. This approach is nice because it does not matter how the form is closed.

This will catch everything except for a VFP application crash and has worked well in practice so far.