COM and XP

I have a number of COM scripts that ran perfectly.. until I got XP, and now they are acting very odd. I know based on reading some of the archive that I am not alone here. What I was not able to determine is this: - Has anyone figured out why it is that you cannot get excel, word, whatever to go "visible" correctly? - Has anyone figured out how to get PHP to shut down the application process once the script is done executing? My little test scripts work. I can get it to dump data into an excel worksheet, but only as long as I include the saveas() in the script (rather than making the workbook visible to the user, and letting them save it manually). I suppose if I fixed that problem, then the other one would fix itself. Any help would be appreciated. aron