>Have you installed all the updates (i.e. SP's, patches) for W2k & Office?

No. We're all running SP1 in Windows 2000 Pro and Office. Unfortunaly our PC's are locked down. The good side of that is we KNOW everyone is the same and that no one has loaded something stupid.

>I think their on SP3 for both. Look for a patern (same users, same computers, same previous applications before the orphaned WINWORD.EXE process)....are there users with similar office functions who don't have this issue (are they using the same h/w and s/w) just some things to look at.

Everyone has the exact same hardware and software versions. The users have an identical function and all of them get the problem at some point. A VB application occasionally creates a document in Word, the users prints it and has the option to save it. When they're done, Word is closed and they're back to using the VB application. It always looks like Word goes away, but sometimes the process is still there. When that happens, the VB app will not open Word again until the previous process is ended.

So far I have not found a series of steps that guarantees that I can recreate this problem. If I could, then I'd try this at home on a non locked down PC with SP 3.