Tamar,

I think you've hit it... I looked and according to the NT taskman excel is still in memory. I shutdown the VFP instance, but Excel still remained in memory. I killed it from taskman and then the sheet opens fine. Am I not doing something to get Excel to unload when I'm done with it?

local loExcel

loExcel = createobject( "excel.application" )
loExcel.Visible = .t.

... do stuff

loExcel.Quit()

loExcel = .null.

Well the above code works ok, Excel terminates from memory.. looks like I've got a dangling object ref in the other code... I'll go ferret it out.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

>I wonder if there's an issue with Excel still holding a lock on the file in some way. I haven't run into this so much with Excel, but I've had a number of cases with Word where I can't do what I want with a file because Word's still holding onto it.