>But your opportunities for using COM under .net will be less and less. For example, with visual studio tools for .net (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/office/) you will be able to use vb.net and c# with word and excel. So scratch that one off your list.

does a .net assembly (the .exe part of it) access win32 directly or does it need the COM subsystem to do its job?

I suspect that a typical .NET assembly is a sophisticated COM object but i do not know much about it...

Dave.