VB Forum / COM / January 2004

Unless I miss the point of your post, this is just part of good programming
practice.  You have to keep up with the objects you instantiate & destroy
them (set = Nothing) when done.  In other words, for every object you set to
something, you must also, at some point, set it to nothing.  Realizing that
setting an object to nothing calls the class terminate event of the class,
you can also do some cleaning up in each terminate event.

With your own objects, you could put tracking stuff in each and every
Class_Initialize and Class_Terminate event:

----module globals-----

global objects as new collection
----

private sub class_initialize()
 objects.add typename(me) & " at " & hex$(objptr(me)), "x" & hex$(objptr(me))
end sub

private sub class_terminate()
 objects.remove "x" & hex$(objptr(me))
end sub

...or you could use the "objects" collection to store "weak references"
if you want to be able to interrogate the objects in the list.

--
Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com>  Sign the Check! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above        They're   coming  to
because  my cats have  apparently  learned to type.        take me away, ha ha!

Hi David,

Based on my experience, there is no methods to find active objects. So you
have to track the COM objects' creation and destruction yourself.

I think Joe Foster's suggestion is a good method.
If you have any concern on this issue, please post here.

Regards,
Peter Huang
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security 
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

I've met the same problem that COM objects can not be released after the
client program has been terminated.