Never mind. I found what is causing the problem, and the solution -- this is just weird.

Before I ran the above snippit of code ran, I called "Application.ScreenUpdating = False".

After all the files were opened, I called "Application.ScreenUpdating = True".
I thought this would prevent the user from seeing the files opening (it doesn't -- you can still see the blank document outlines opening).

Well, I commented out the screenupdating code -- and voila -- everything works great, and the files no longer lock up.

Have a nice day --(My bad).