Quote Originally Posted by Elroy View Post
Do we have a way to return an instantiated object from a standard DLL, and then use it early-bound?
Early bounding is just a contract (interface). You can even violate the COM rules and return a similar interface with different IID.

Quote Originally Posted by Elroy View Post
Why would I want this? I just think standard DLLs are nicer than ActiveX DLLs in that we don't have to register them nor mess with our manifest to use them in a "SxS" fashion.
You can see some VB6-projects here where you can instantiate objects from VB6-ActiveX DLL without any registration/SxS.