>You're right. Thats actually how I am doing it. One Excel instance, creates and formats each xls, saves and closes it in a loop. So, the 100 workbooks are open 1 at a time, not all at once, and there are not multiple instances of excel running. (I don't know how to quote msgs, so I don't have a quote here)

Are all the SR's current on Excel? I do remember being bitten by a slightly different memory problem that SR-2 fixed.

Just for grins...does the problem happen if you Quit the Excel app, say, every 50 files? Maybe you can force it to retrieve some lost resources? I hate to field a solution like that, but it might help figure out what's going on...

- della