Like ASP, once you create a COM object instance, you gotta destroy it - if not it will slowly fill up your memory.
In ASP, you just set your object reference to nothing.
How would u do it in PHP?
php knows how to clean up objects...asp is definatly not php in this respect.
It really depends on your object. Things like a recordset have a close() (or disconenct or somthing) method that you may want to call.
To simply unset a variable, use unset($var)