I believe the error occurs when the spell checker window does not come to the foreground, I had thought to force that using WindowState, but it doesn't always happen. If I use the task manager to view processes, I can see that word is indeed open, but I cannot get to the word window using this program. I had previously tried using oWord.ActveDocument in my spell check code and got the same results, but I'll try it again to step thru the code more closely. Any other thoughts?