Excel does not quit because your application is still holding references to COM objects.
I guess you’re invoking at least one member of a COM object without assigning it to a variable.
For me it was the excelApp.Worksheets object which I directly used without assigning it to a variable:
Worksheet sheet = excelApp.Worksheets.Open(...);
...
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(sheet);
I didn’t know that internally C# created a wrapper for the Worksheets COM object which didn’t get released by my code (because I wasn’t aware of it) and was the cause why Excel was not unloaded.
I found the solution to my problem on this page, which also has a nice rule for the usage of COM objects in C#:
Never use two dots with COM objects.
So with this knowledge the right way of doing the above is:
Worksheets sheets = excelApp.Worksheets; // <-- The important part
Worksheet sheet = sheets.Open(...);
...
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(sheets);
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(sheet);
POST MORTEM UPDATE:
I want every reader to read this answer by Hans Passant very carefully as it explains the trap I and lots of other developers stumbled into. When I wrote this answer years ago I didn’t know about the effect the debugger has to the garbage collector and drew the wrong conclusions. I keep my answer unaltered for the sake of history but please read this link and don’t go the way of “the two dots”: Understanding garbage collection in .NET and Clean up Excel Interop Objects with IDisposable