Thanks to Ted Young who gave me this method. However, I was having some problems with a user trying to initialize the Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject method (trying to grab Excel.Application). I didn't realize the appropriate permissions had to be set on the DCOM service running (that fixed that part). But where there is (I guess) Windows authentication going on and a non-administrative user logs to the site (cgi script in Perl, in this site of course) the Win32::OLE->Uninitialize doesn't work. Any suggestions on what else I may have to do? Thanks again wisdom warriors...