Help with Word Interop PLEASE!!! - more readable version

Hi Gang,

I have posted this issue everywhere I can think of, and have yet to receive a single response.  I am hoping that some kind and much-smarter-than-I soul here at MS will shed some light on this blasted problem.

I have a Windows Service that I wrote with VB.NET that fetches a Word doc via FTPS and prints it locally.  The service was not working due to an error that I could not trap (or didn't understand), so I decided to just write a plain old Win Forms app to do the same job until I could figure out the service issue.

I wrote the Win Forms app, and whenever I get to the call to create a new Word.Application instance, my code wanders off into the weeds, never to be heard from again.  I have tried creating the instance with both:

wordApp = New Word.Application

and

wordApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")

Both produce the same results.  However, the CreateObject call would occaisionally throw a "Cannot create ActiveX control (or component, can't remember which)" exception.

Now, here is the weird part.  I have another Web app that uses the same code, and it worked fine (with regard to the instantiation of the Word.Application call)
on my dev machine... until I hit this problem with the service.  Now, suddenly, the Web app is doing the same thing.  As far as I know, nothing has changed on my system (except perhaps a recent Windows update, which could be the culprit, I guess).

I have searched high and low on the Net for solutions, and have found many, but none seem to work.  I am also able to reproduce this on my deployment machine, so the one possibility I read that said my OS was corrupted, does not seem viable.

Can anyone shed some light on this, or guide me through to a solution   Help me Obi Wan Kenobi... you're my only hope...

Cheers,

Chris