Then the next thing is to duplicate your perl call back in a VB sub and run that sub in the VB debugger. I would also see it Excel never quits properly using your Perl script. We encountered a problem with Win32::OLE after we went to a new service pack on Win2K and we had not changed our Perl where Win32::OLE would not let Excel die. The problem went away again after we migrated to XP. We found a workaround and it looks like voodoo. I will share it with you if you find the same issue, but I would try the manual VB sub thing and also maybe running with $excel->{Visible} = 1; just so I could keep excel alive and have a lookie at the pdf as if I were doing it manually.