>That's a COM object? I thought it was something like OLE automation.

Ooh, now we get into a confusion of terms: they're the same thing. You're automating a COM object. MSFT *used* to call it OLE automation, but once COM went beyond what OLE really means (Object Linking and Embedding), MSFT dumped OLE and started referring to everything as COM. Beyond that, now we've got COM+, er I mean Next Generation Windows Services. Oh, scratch that, it's .net now. :-)