well, i tracked down the application that's causing the error. it appears IconPackager v3.0 is the culprit. game runs fine until i install that and reboot, then i get the COM error. the first time i tried it after i figured out which app, i uninstalled it, rebooted, and SSE worked again. so i reinstalled it (and rebooted) to reproduce the error, which it did. this time, however, when i uninstalled IP and rebooted, the COM error didn't go away (and won't, from what i've seen with this problem. this is a clean install of windows i'm trying.) i have a ghost image of the pre-IP windows installation, which i'm going to restore and try to reproduce the error again.