whoops, it appears that this is the offending line

oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(8).visible = .F.

any idea why? anyone? the shape does exist, it's the same sheet opened every time and then just populated as a report for a job, the shapes form a large semitransparent word COPY for two copies naturally :)

anything I can do to avoid this causing a c0000005 error?

again it's only once every 20 or so runs it falls over. for the moment I've taken the shapes bit out and told people to use rubber stamps, they'll get nasty soon though, people don't like having to actually do stuff.