>BTW : Have you found any nifty ways to speed up loading Word in the first
>instance - this seems to take a long time on some of the PCs my clients have
>ie Pentiums with 64MB RAM. What one of the other developers has done is
>write a multi-threaded dll in Delphi (I think). This is fired as soon as the
>VFP form appears and loads Word in the background (with the a new document
>from the required template) while the User is sitting in front of the VFP
>form filling in details for his/her document.
>However, this dll is a little unstable at times.

No, I haven't found a way to speed up loading Word -- but I really haven't tried to conceal the time it takes to load. The clients I've worked with have been so thrilled that they can get 4-8 hours worth of manual work done in 5 minutes, that they didn't complain about making it faster. In fact, I once heard the client describe it as "the coffee break feature" as it took just long enough to go get a cup of coffee and clear the mind!

Maybe someone else will jump in and give some ideas?

- della