COM isn't Windows-only. It's a cross-platform technology that happens to be used far more often on Windows than any other platform. However, as anyone who's done anything with IOKit on Mac can tell you, COM isn't limited to just Windows.

And this deserves to be on the front page of a non-idle post why?

It's also been tried many times and succeeded, as just about any entomologist can point out.

I use Vista with 8 cores and 8 GB of RAM, and it runs like a gem. Perhaps your IT people should stop reading /. and actually try the technologies they refuse to run. Of course, I'm sure someone here will simply point out that you need to have such a beefy machine in order to run Vista. Oh look, a cliff for us to jump off!