>They say there is no problem with VB or in .Net so unlikely they are going to help me further :-(

Then fire up VB6, create a simple activeX-class which acts as a mediator and puts your info into their control.
The runtimes of VB are probably on the target computers, and if that is really a problem,
you can still port the vb code over into a C activeX.
As you already have some activeX to register, one more should not be that bad.

HTH

thomas