VB Forum / General 2 / May 2006

From an old post of mine...

Never, never, never, never, ever use the End statement to terminate your
program.

End should ***NEVER*** be used in VB. When you start writing more complex
code, you will find that in certain situations, VB needs to do some cleaning
up (and you need to help it). You can go to this Google newsgroup link

http://groups.google.co.uk/advanced_group_search?num=100&as_scoring=d&as_ugroup=*.vb*

and look up the exact word "vb" and the exact phrase "end statement" (leave
off the quotes in both of these) to find the many ways people have explained
the why and what of not using the End statement. Suffice it to say that the
End statement stops your program in the same way running into a brick wall
stops your car... immediately. You don't get a chance to coast to a stop and
turn your key to the off position, open the door and exit the vehicle. The
same thing happens with the End statement... BOOM!, everything stops dead in
its tracks right then and there and the program ends. The moral is... NEVER,
NEVER, NEVER use the End statement in your program! (And, in the same way,
using that "solid square" icon on VB's Toolbar, or clicking End in the Run
menu, to stop your project during development is the identical equivalent of
executing an End statement in code... you shouldn't do that either.)

Consider this... From the VB Help Files: "More About Forms"

"The End statement ends an application immediately: no code after the End
statement is executed, and no further events occur. In particular, Visual
Basic will not execute the QueryUnload, Unload or Terminate event procedures
for any forms. Object references will be freed, but if you have defined your
own classes, Visual Basic will not execute the Terminate events of objects
created from your classes."

"In addition to the End statement, the Stop statement halts an application.
However, you should use the Stop statement only while debugging, because it
does not free references to objects."

Rick