It looks like you want a system-wide singleton (accross process boundaries). You would indeed get funny results with this approach: - different processes (in your example: IIS and the C++-application) instanciating your component would get a singleton *per process*. - any static data you maintain dies when your dll goes out of memory: this happens if all interfaces are released: DLLCanUnload is called on a regular basis, and when it returns true (default ATL-implementation: when all reference counts are zero), the dll is unloaded. You can solve this problem by leaving the COM-singleton for what it is, designing your component as a multiply instantiatable component and using either static data in a persistent, out-of-process server (take a look at ATL-service) or simply persist your data in a database.
