Eric Lippert has posted an entry about the habit, which seems to be predominantly a VB/ASP habit, of setting things to Nothing, even if they are just about to go out of scope, at which time the garbage collector will free them anyway.

It's a good read, and his discussion is technically accurate, but some of the comments point to the real reasons programmers do this (hey, I used to). For one, especially in ADO, it was a good idea to release objects early and often so to speak. And a lot of code samples do it. I knew when it was and was not necessary, but did it anyway, because it doesn't hurt anything, and once you are in the habit of releasing those objects, you tend to do it all the time. Kind of like getting a haircut once every 3 weeks whether you need to or not.

Either way, check out the entry, because he certainly isn't wrong about when it is unnecessary, and he is right that it can turn the code into clutter, and in the case of VBScript, the code is often cluttered enough already ;)