Dave,

Some more info from this morning's tests:

The NT4SP3, VS6SP3, IE5.01 (with downgrade back to the 5.0 msxml.dll) box was able to instantiate it once this morning, it couldn't connect to Sybase and they realized there was a missing .ini file. They fixed that and every time he tried to instantiate it from then on it threw the 0x80040154 bad hresult.

I came over and tried it from VFP, it appeared that VFP hung because we were getting no echo back to the screen of the data the COM was providing. We terminated the VFP session, tried it again and then VFP started getting the 0x80040154 on it's createobject() call. I went to look at the diagnostic file the COM uses, and it turns out the the first VFP attempt had indeed run! There were results of the 3 test calls to the COM method, but the ? command in the code never displayed those results to the screen. The hang might be somewhere in the destruct of the COM because the diagnostic message of the destruct sequence isn't in the log file.

I use filetostr(,,.t.) to just append info in the log.

The VFP COM uses wwXML and the MS XMLDOM along with a plain cSQL class that manages the Sybase connection handle.

We rebooted the box, started VFP and tried to run the test and still got the 0x80040154 error so it's something that can persist through even a reboot.

Do you know of any kind of "lock" that NT4 or VS6 or ??? might be putting on the DLL that prevents it from being instantiated if the original process is abnormally terminated?