>I want to make absolutely sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying that it is not easy to have the UI choose which server to instantiate on? Is this what you mean by "ubiquitous addressing of servers?" If so, then this is a serious snag in my plans.
>

It is certainly not the best way to go, but you could have a table of available servers which a front end ap will access and will go thorough the table and try to lock each record. Once it gets a lock, it can read the info on that server and use it. It would be a simple matter to modify this table as you add or move servers on the LAN.

But, a better way is to use a pool manager. The Client sends the request to the pool manager, which knows what servers are ready and passes the request to the com server. No worry though, this ap has already been written and is readily avialable to you. It is called WestWind WebConnection.

If you check out www.west-wind.com can read about the new wwHTTPCOM class that Rick has put into Web Connection 3.0, I think it will handle this for you very well. Of course, you have the aditional overhead of IIS running on your pool manger machine, but hey, it does alot of stuff for you!

BOb