I've just tried the same VBA on a colleague's PC, and it performs as expected, except that if you make Excel visible, whether it's a new or existing instance, at the end of the VBA any created instance of Excel is shut down.

This is probably logical - "I birthed it, I'll kill it!": just a little unexpected, as during the development stage of this sort of technique (opening a document with another application), in my experience errors in the "birthing" code usually leave other applications open, however "damaged" they may be.

I don't want to re-install Office 2010 (or the OS!) to "cure" this abnormality, so, any ideas on "Settings" which may cause this behaviour, or ways of comparing settings between two instances of Office 2010 (unlikely, I know)?

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.....