>I have found that a simple COM object takes about a sixth of the time it takes to instantiate a native VFP Custom class.

Wow - are you sure about that??? VFP can't use Dual Interfaces when binding to COM
objects so it has to use IDispatch with GETIDOFNAMES and Invoke() which are rather
slow. I have to check that out, but I really find that hard to believe unless your
VFP custom class has a stack of public interfaces.

>Calling methods and accessing properties is straightforward and the marshalling that is done during automation calls makes it easy to pass strings between VFP and C++.

No marshalling is required since COM objects are typically in-process.
But yeah, COM allows you to create C++ classes that are accessible externally.

The thing I hate about ATL is having to deal with the OLE type conversions
and which of the 50 or so to use <s>... the subtle differences can really
throw you for a loop especially when dealing with binary string data...

+++ Rick ---