Please help with PHP COM problem (using MS Office)

Hi! I can't for the life of me figure out how to make excel or word visible using COM. What I mean is: $excel = new COM("Application.Excel"); $excel->visible = true; does not work for me, no matter what I try! I am running PHP 4.0.6 CGI alongside Apache 1.3.22 on Windows XP. I have no trouble pulling the Version and Value settings, ie: print "Loaded {$excel->Value}, v{$excel->Version}"; yields: Loaded Excel, v10.0 but doing: print "Visible: {$excel->Visible}"; doesn't show anything (except "Visible:") All the examples for using COM in PHP (including the example in the PHP manual) include this command ($excel->visible = 1)... and I can't find any resources on the net to help me... I tried doing the same in VBScript and it worked fine (Setting visible to 1)... so I'm really stuck here! Things I have tried: 1) replacing true with: 1, "1", "true" 2) using $excel->application->visible = true (and others from 1) 3) installing Excel 2000 over Excel XP (2002) (as all the examples used this...) and using $excel = new COM("Application.Excel.9") In summary: I can do pretty much anything else using COM that I have gotten examples for on the internet... I used Alain Samoun's EXCEL PHP class without a problem (except that the bloody excel window won't show!!)... and I can create word documents and insert data into them and save them, but I never actually see the Word window. Any help GREATLY appreciated, as I have been working on this for 2 days and I can't find a solution. Thanks in advance, Nicholas Catanchin.