Bob,

>Number 2 sounds good but I'm not up to speed on Web Services yet.

If you can run Web Connection on the server where the second COM object lives, you can use it (latest version) to set up a WC-based Web Service that receives XML, does its stuff, and returns an XML result.

You might be able to do something similar with the second ASP page, but with it returning XML to the first COM object instead of feeding it into the Response. I can't tell you how to do that, however, but it's probably possible.