title: Is anyone successfully using registration-free COM with .NET components?
body: <p>Until recently, we were happily using <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973913.aspx" rel="noreferrer">registration-free COM</a> for our native and .NET COM components. However, we ran into a weird issue where our application started crashing randomly on windows XP SP3 (but not on vista) after we only changed the version number of a .NET assembly to move from release candidate to release. (Don't you just hate Murphy's law?)</p>
  
  <p>After many a lost man-day and teeth grinding, we discovered that the issue was a <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943232" rel="noreferrer">known bug in sxs.dll</a> which causes heap corruption when retrieving information about a .NET class. There is a hot-fix which makes the issue disappear but hot-fixes are not intended to be redistributed.</p>
  
  <p>We're kinda stumped that there is such a horrible bug in the registration-free COM implementation. Is anyone out there successfully using registration-free COM for .NET components? How did you work around this issue?</p>