On May 23, 2:01*pm, GS wrote:
Here's a snippet from Professional Excel Development
Ch.07 that explains how memory leaks occur, and why
it's considered *good practice* to set objects we're
done with to *= Nothing*.

That's a matter of opinion, just as some people might say it is "good
practice" to explicitly initialize non-static local variables to zero
in a procedure instead of relying on the fact they are initialized to
zero each time a procedure is entered.

The development guide describes a complex situation where, I would
agree, it is necessary to set an object variable to Nothing, namely
objects that reference other objects.

But I was asking about a very limited case, namely: setting the
object variable to Nothing just before exiting a procedure, when the
object variable is a non-static local variable.

In that case, VBA help explains:

"When several object variables refer to the same object, memory and
system resources associated with the object to which the variables
refer are released only after all of them have been set to Nothing,
either explicitly using Set, __or_implicitly__ after the last object
variable set to Nothing goes out of scope."

Exiting a procedure is an example of non-static local variable going
out of scope. In that case, VBA should implicitly set the object
variable to Nothing, decreasing the object reference count. If that
causes the reference count to go to zero, the system should free the
memory associated with it.

When Isabelle mentioned a "memory leak", I was thinking of a systemic
memory leak (defect in VBA), not a program memory leak (programming
error).