Hi John,
Thanx for still thinking about this. Please direct me to a reference for wscript.shell. I never used it or saw it in print. I won't be near vfp today but I look forward to playing aroung with this solution. I will update you on Wednesday. Please tell me what FWIW means..:)

Regars,
Dr. G. (Neil)

>Neil
>
>FWIW, and since I am asking a question here too, there is another way that does not require polling etc:
>
>
>loshell=CREATEOBJECT("WScript.Shell")
>loshell.run("myfilename.doc",3,.t.)
>*---stops here until Word is closed
>messagebox("You closed word!")
>
>
>Regards
>
>JR