Thanks for the replies guys. As for the service settings, this is a Win2K box - on the tab "log on" you can enable that feature IF you have it run as a local system account. Would this be a good thing?? Not to sure about running it with this, versus as a Local Admin.

Secondly, I would agree that using the SQL would be a lot nicer maybe. The excel piece was built beause it was fast to do, and the XLS file can be quickly modified and cut up for various tests. However, in regards to Excel being left open, that is not my main problem. The start of every script contains the UDF that allows me to kill any currently running ones. This is just an indicator of a bigger problem, that the script is not running properly and is erroring out at some point and leaving Excel open. Unless I fix this problem, would I not have the same issue with SQL queries. Regardless of where I parse the data from, there seems to be a bug in the script that doesn't process correctly, hence leaving Excel open and leaving the $huh set at the default of 2.

Thanks,
Shawn