>I know that I can use oword.quit(wdDoNotSaveChanges) to prevent the usual 'Do >you want to save the changes' dialog, but I don't have warm fuzzies that this >is the only thing that could cause word to pause quitting while waiting for an >answer.

>I have discovered that successfully quitting word does not release local >object reference variables I use to access it, nor does it set them to NULL. >So checking for these conditions (existence and/or nullity) aren't helpful.

1. oWord = CREATEOBJECT("word.application")
2. oWord.Quit()
3. release oWord
4. oWord = ""

I have also found that if you use CTRL-ALT-DEL at line 2 Winword is still running and at line 3 also but not at line 4.