Hi again, A slightly harder problem this time. I want to implement something that looks something like the Microsoft XML parser. This is a very COM heavy contraption that provides an interface that looks to client applications like a tree of COM objects that reflects the internal structure of an XML document. The idea is, you start with the document object, make a method call requesting the root node, and have a COM object that wraps that node returned to you. You can then request the children of that node, and their children and siblings, all which involves being passed back interface pointers to COM objects. Effectively, there is one COM object per syntactic item in the XML document. I already have my document object working nicely. This is where the actual database resides. I want to be able to spawn views of this database as COM objects. When I've done this in the past (using ATL mostly, euuuugh), I've used an IDL definition something like HRESULT CreateView([in,string] BSTR query, [out,retval] IDbView **); What's the correct way to implement the necessary Haskell code to create the coclass and return a pointer to it? I fiddled around for ages, but either couldn't get GHC to like the types I was using, or when I finally got it to compile, I found that my test harness was being passed an invalid COM object. This should be simple stuff, so I'm sure someone will have done it! Secondly, it is a nasty, though fairly common trick, if you know your objects are going to be created in the same process space, to allow them some 'behind the scenes' communication. In my case, I'd like to avoid needing to serialise and deserialse the data in a view during creation of these child objects (of which there may be a great many, and which may be created on the fy rather often). Ideally, I'd like to be able to do something like: newView :: String -> State -> IO State newView db (State st) = do db <- readIORef st r <- newIORef db -- Insert some kind of COM magic here return (State r) so the database content gets copied within the Haskell environment (lazily, I'd hope), without needing to be serialised and deserialised. Is this feasible? One (messy) approach might be to create a bunch of extra interfaces on the main database object, then create 'thin wrapper' child objects that simply make calls back into the parent object. I'm not so keen on that for various reasons, however. Sarah