DAVID S. PLATT is president of Rolling Thunder Computing, a leading consulting firm specializing in COM development. He is an instructor in Computer Science at Harvard University and also teaches COM and COM+ at public seminars and in-house at companies all over the world. He publishes "ThunderClap," a quarterly newsletter on COM+ development, available free from his Web site. His column "ActiveXplained" appears bimonthly on Byte.Com.