>>It's probably similar to a "dangling object" in VFP. If you don't do anything with the Excel object, it doesn't create any internal references to anything. If you do something with Excel, it probably makes some internal objects that only a ox.Quit() releases properly.
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>that makes sense. in which case this proves me wrong also in my statement earlier in this thread, where i thought that 'release oExcel' is something like killing the process in the task manager, because that will destroy excel, no matter what.
>
>well, we never cease to learn.

It took me quite awhile before I realized the problem. I used to only release the variable, but I would get mysterious crashes after a few days. My development box has 1.25GB ram, and I'd only notice it after I was ending up with about 40 instances of Excel in memory and crashed. Boy was I ever surprised when I happened to look in Task Manager one day before one of those crashes!