Colin,

Great article. I really liked this bit: "It may seem like a cruel joke, but any usage of the global 'Application' reference will appear to run correctly within VB 6.0, but in fact this is true only the first time you run your code."

It would appear I've been leaving excel instances floating about....how embarrassing.

I added an xlsApp. (my excel application object) prefix to the first part of the if statement where the value = "Y". The first run went without a hitch. The second run hung up on the 5th record, the 5th record being the first one with a value of "N" rather than "Y".

Thanks again for you help.