Office Automation :: Excel Program Leaves EXCEL.EXE Floating After Completion

I am writing a program that loops through all of the sheets in an Excel workbook and saves each sheet as its own workbook. It turned out to be a bit trickier than I expected, since the Sheet.Copy method creates a strange object (see here for the MSDN discussion that I believe is relevant: [URL]. Anyway, I found a Stack Overflow post [URL] that got me to where I am, which is essentially complete, outside of one hanging EXCEL.EXE process that is left after the program completes, which I believe is a result of the sheet.copy method creating a new workbook (potentially a new application as well?). The other thing I run into, which I believe is related to this, is that even though I have my application set to visibility off, when I run the program, excel still opens up and is visible going through the steps.

Here is my code:

Code:
Imports System.Data
Imports System.IO
Imports Microsoft.Office.Interop

[CODE]...

Now I think the problem comes from the end of the loop, where I try to close the export file and the new worksheet it creates:

Code:
'close excel and release com objects
System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(exportsheet)
exportsheet = Nothing
xlApp1.Workbooks(fileNames(counter - 1)).Close(False)

I can't figure out what to do to release the `ComObject` for the new worksheet that is created. I have been trying all sorts of things, but it always throws a COM error when I do it and if I try to define it as nothing (like I do with exportsheet) is says that it is read only by default, so I can't do it. It seems like it should be something as simple as: System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(xlApp1.Workboo ks(fileNames(counter - 1))) But that is not the case. I have tried a few variants of this and I am thinking it has to do with the MSDN link above, but I can't quite sort out what to do. So the code works for my purposes, outside of leaving one EXCEL.EXE after it is done. As far as a test file, I am just using an Excel file with 3 sheets and I put some information on each and change the sheet name, so it is easy to see if it is working or not.