>So it looks like VFP is not going to work for this application because it is late binding.
>So why is it that companies can say they are COM compliant and not be able to work together??

I guess there are different levels of "COM Compliance". By definition, COM compliance only requires IUnknown- but VFP only late binds, so needs objects that support IDispatch.
As widely used as they are, it surprises me that the ESRI objects don't support this- that means they also can't be run from a WSH script, or an ASP. That's pretty lame. I guess they were really built with the C programmer in mind...