I'm using automation to extract contact info from Outlook - (thanks to Della Martin, John Koziol and George Tasker for their help here)

However - if Outlook is not already open - then when I release the object that opened Outlook and grabbed a reference to it's contacts - it is slow. (This is on a Pentium III 700 with 256MB memory - running NT4 and Outlook 2000).

Is this just because closing Outlook is slow ?

I've modified my code so that Outlook isn't closed until the app is exited to minimise the effect on the User.

One thing I thought of was whether I could open Outlook in Fox, make it visible and minimised in the Taskbar and then not close it when Fox is exited.
However - can't seem to do this because (i) CREATEOBJECT("Outlook.Application") without storing the result to a memvar or property - doesn't appear to open Outlook - presumably because there is nothing to keep a reference to it ? and (ii) there is no Visible property for Outlook !

Any thoughts gratefully received

Anna