>HOWEVER, I did notice something very unusual in the Task Manager. In most cases, the EXEs showed up as started by my login: dstevenson. But a few times, I got one of them to show up as started by SYSTEM instead of my login. I could not see a particular pattern to the difference, but it might have been related to startup right after recompiling. I wonder if when you said you found only one EXE you might have been looking at the Task manager list sorted by Login and just missed the new instance if it started up under SYSTEM?

This is an interesting observation, but I do not that think it is the culprit. The reason is my COM object has a Login() function that opens a DBC.

When app1 creates the COM object and logs in an EXE shows up in the Task Manager. When app2 create the COM object and logs in with a different DBC no additional EXE shows up.

Then, when app1 runs something it is affecting the database specified by app2!

Whats interesting is that any more instances created in app2 create their own EXE processes. And when I release the extra ones, and release the app1 instance, and then recreate the app1 instance, we get the new EXE as we expected the first time around.

It seems pretty flaky, what I'm seeing. Kindof like the flakyness you're seeing, but anoyingly different.