Problems saving document immediately after Document Merge - vba

Question

I have an application where I need to merge several nearly identical documents which had been sent out to several users and received with minor changes and comments. The documents are fairly large (500K - 1M) and can contain tables and embedded graphics. The point of this is to consolidate the changes and comments from the various users into one document, keeping track of who did or said what.
The heart of this is the following procedure which uses Application.Merge.
Public Sub runMerge(files As String)
Dim i As Integer
Dim v() As String
v = Split(files, vbCr)
Word.Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Word.Documents.Open fileName:=v(0), ReadOnly:=False, addtorecentfiles:=False
For i = 1 To UBound(v)
ActiveDocument.Merge fileName:=v(i), _
MergeTarget:=wdMergeTargetCurrent, _
DetectFormatChanges:=True, _
UseFormattingFrom:=wdFormattingFromCurrent, _
addtorecentfiles:=False
DoEvents
Next i
Word.Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Word.Application.ScreenRefresh
ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 "Merge " & Replace(Now, ":", "."), , , , False
End Sub
The code opens the first file explicitly, then merges the remaining documents in a loop. Apart from being a bit fragile, this works correctly as long as the first document was explicitly opened.
Once merged, I use SaveAs2 with a new unqualified file name (i.e. no explicit directory). This works fairly well.
However, if I attempt to use SaveAs2 to place the file in a different directory, as in
ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 "C:\.....\Merge " & Replace(Now, ":", "."), , , , False
the resulting document does not re-appear on the screen after the merge. Further, when explicitly opened later, the document appears somehow damaged, strangely formatted, in one case, some of the text appeared in an orange colour. This behaviour has been seen in Word 2013 and 2016.
Apart from saving the document in whatever default directory (My Documents, in my case), then explicitly moving the file in VBA using copy and Kill and what not, how would one save this without an extra step?

Answer 1

In the end, I did the following to solve the save problem.
Using the super-easy FileCopy VBA function, I copied the first file in the merge group to the directory where I wanted the merged file to end up.
The merge loop remains unchanged.
When the merge loop is done, I used the solution from an earlier post, VBA word table copy loses data, ActiveDocument.Select followed by Selection.Collapse.
ActiveDocument.Save, not SaveAs