The stability of planar creeping extensional flow with a free surface, that may occur in sheet stretching, is investigated. For that purpose a former investigation that only deals with Newtonian fluids and which always leads to instability, is generalized to fluids with finite memory. It is shown, that finite relaxation times have different influences on stability for different materials. Thus a Maxwelland a Doi-Edwards fluid give unstable solutions like a Newtonian fluid, but in the case of a Maxwell fluid the rate of growth of the disturbances decreases with growing relaxation time, while it increases in case of a Doi-Edwards fluid.