That is an interesting point - however if that was the intended flow for the
application.quit, then why would it behave one way (immediately going to the
auto_close) when stepping through the code, yet continue through the message
boxes when actually running the code?

Regardless, adding the DoEvents command  after the application.quit makes the
code behave the way I expect it to, which is all I can ask of my computer!!

Thanks all for the input. I am a TM1 programmer (an OLAP tool - basically a
really big and robust pivot table) which uses Excel as its front end and it's
great finding a forum like this to discuss Excel / VBA issues. I hope I can
contribute sometime soon.