Dave,

>You sure can take advantage of my post! What exactly do you mean by "I tweaked the COM to add some additional data"?

It was possible that the first time the real VC code calling into the COM had an error during the SQLConnect() the COM was doing, so I added a dump of aerror() into the XML return value of the COM. The tweaked COM worked from VFP and VC on my Win95 box. But the tweaked COM wouldn't instantiate after it was registered on the NT4 box.