Hi Nicholas,
hmn, in the end it will connect indeed to an external device, but in my case I need to connect to a DLL, which is accessible via COM. The DLL has been written in VB6 and this is the only way to connect to it from a C++ app. If I get not any further with this these days I will write a wrapper DLL.

I am just a bit curious because even the initialization function fails, but in my console application not.

P.S: Happy birthday!