Shouldn't happen just because of a transition to 2003. Did anyone make
*any* change to the VB6 program?

One common cause of why XL doesn't close is at
Program won't quit
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/vb...quit/index.htm

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Regards,

Tushar Mehta
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions

In article ,
says...
I have several VB6.0 programs that open Excel, writes data in cells, closes
Excel several times within a program. This worked beautiful with Office 2000
without a hitch. My company recently pushed Office 2003 onto our machines,
and the same programs no longer closes Excel. There is an instance for each
time it opened Excel remaining in the background. This presents a problem
for large number of instances. Does anyone know about this change in Excel?
I've tested it on several machines with/without the new 2003 version.