Della,

You hit upon the problem and answer :)

Not only Documents.Save, but also Documents.Close forces Word to show. I changed all the .Save's to .ActiveDocument.SaveAs, and all the .Close's to .ActiveDocument.Close.
And no more flashing, not even showing on the windows taskbar.

Thank you for your help.
I feels great to get something to work just the way you want after struggling a bit.
Carol Dewar
Magram Computer Services

>The .Save command is forcing Word to show itself, as it's waiting for user input. A way to get around this is to use the .SaveAs method, and specify a filename:

>oWord.ActiveDocument.SaveAs("D:\Documents\ThisIsNew.DOC")