>Hit this HARD with DCOM, is there ANY way to neatly and without memory leak close a COM object if it errors?

It is the responsibility of the COM to clean after itself. If it doesn't, the caller has no power over this.

>Excepted, however if the "main" EXE fails or is "end-tasked" is there anyway on startup to "clean up"?

Win2K/XP may detect that the owner is closed and do the clean up itself. Otherwise, only a reboot will reclaim the memory/resources.