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Issue with MS Access 365 not releasing Forms from Forms collection

Anonymous
2025-04-02T12:15:56+00:00

I'm running MS Access Version 2502 (Build 18526.20168 Click-to-Run), Current Channel and I've noticed that in certain scenario Forms are not being removed from Forms collection.
If I create a new database with a single form called 'Form1' and add 2 public methods to it:

Public Sub Show()

Me.Visible = True

End Sub

Public Sub Hide()

Me.Visible = False

End Sub

then I add a Standard Module with the following code:

Public frm As Form_Form1

Public Sub Test()

Set frm = New Form_Form1

'frm.Show

Debug.Print Forms.Count

'frm.Hide

Set frm = Nothing

Debug.Print Forms.Count

End Sub

and slowly step through the code, first Debug.Print will show the count of 1 and the second goes back to 0 as expected.
But if I uncomment Show & Hide methods and step through the code again, the counter never clears.

Has that been already acknowledged, has anybody else experienced this issue?

Thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | Access | For business | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-11T12:51:41+00:00

    It's not so much hiding the Form but clearing the reference (set frm = nothing) that is the key here. In the latest code snippet, I've removed the hiding part.
    In my tiny brain this is how it should work:
    If we're dealing with the default form instance, we need to start it up with DoCmd.OpenForm and because that is a Sub, it doesn't return form object reference back and it need to be closed with DoCmd.Close.
    If we're dealing with creating instances of the Form, we need to assign it to the variable, that increases a counter for that object in VBA/COM layer but Access must be tapping into that to pass that reference to it's internal Forms collection. When that variable gets cleared (or goes out of scope) VBA/COM layer reference counter gets decreased, Access should clear that reference in the Forms collection and object gets released.
    So if you step through the code when we set frm = nothing (and not hiding form first), form should disappear from screen because in debug mode Access internal processes can still run. At runtime can add DoEvents to lett Access do it's thing.
    In our weird environments, Forms collection reference to that Form doesn't get cleared though, leading to Forms occupying memory and stacking up in forms collection.

    Some very basic info regarding this in the following article (can't find anything more in-depth):
    Create multiple instances of a form | Microsoft Learn

    Initially when this was reported to us, we couldn't replicate it. We suspected that this will be related to Click-To-Run but at the time my machine was still on Win11 22H2. I think that after upgrading to 23H2 I've started seeing the issue but probably Office was upgraded at the same time.
    We were hoping that this would be easier to reproduce by the community but sadly it is not the case.
    We may need to create clean VM with just Office installation to see if we can reproduce it.

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