>I have an MTDLL that gets called from ASP and from some non-ASP environments. In the Init(), I want to make sure a given file exists and if not then quit. Is it possible to make that happen without killing/hanging the caller?

Yes, you can return .F. from Init() function and COM object will not be created. In that case the caller will get an OLE error 0x80004005 ("Unspecified error").