Last week I posted about some frustrating bug hunting:

In fact, I still don’t know what the problem is, but I’m moving on for now (confident that this problem will resurface somewhere else).

I was faced with the problem almost immediately because the feature wasn’t working on Server 2003 either. So, back into it I went.

This morning I figured out the original problem: that special form of DLL hell created by waxy-build up of shifting COM registry data.

Great news! Well, no, not really. Turns out it wasn’t the same problem. So I’m still dealing with a frustrating registration-free COM activation issue on Server 2003. This code used to work. So, I don’t know if we broke something or if a recent Windows Update did. Time to do some spelunking.