Hi Neil,

Still, sounds to me that a Form still is the ultimate container for any call to open Word. The fact of the matter is that at some point that form will receive focus and fire off the Word-kill code. It may or may not matter if the Word object is kept alive a little longer than Word itself.

>How did you think of that? It worked on the form that I automate WORD from. I did not get a busy signal and all works great. I do need to add a fly to the ointment now. I have 2 other areas in my app that automate WORD. The thisform.Gotfocus() test is a little tricky since when WORD returns I'm a little uncertain as to what actually has focus. You see, I have one situation where a toolbar calls a method on the activeform that contians the killer loop. I also have another situation where a container object that has the method code with the killer loop is called from a toolbar button that activates a click of a button on the container that resides on a page of a page frame. I need to work around this for a while.