Here's something I just wandered across you may find useful. This is the formal design of COM, authored by Microsoft and Digital. This version is a copied and ziped 200-page Word document.

Component Object Model Specification

I found it here.
Posted on 2001-07-30 19:22:37 by Ernie
In a sense of preservation of threads i ran across this. (Didnt know it was here!). I think someone was looking for this a while ago...
Posted on 2003-09-28 11:16:05 by NaN
For beginners.. here is a good page from the specification to that diagramatically explains how com loads an object class for use.

(I wish i had this while learning to how to develop COM objects ;) )
Posted on 2003-09-28 11:39:19 by NaN