Thanks guys, but still none the clearer really! Despite spending the last 6 or so months doing embedded stuff pretty much exclusively, we also write PCB design software - hence my questions about speed! COM is a nasty mess in C (or C++) especially when dealing with variants, obviously this all disappears under C#. Things are further complicated that our application is Win32 api & up until last year was C++ free, I only turned to C++ when I needed to wrap up and hide some COM horrors for msxml.

With regards to deprecated, I used the Ctrl+Apple+D dictionary when I wrote deprecated initially and it said:

1. express disapproval of
2. another term for depreciate (sense 2)

So I looked at depreciate and the sentiment I was trying to get across was covered under depreciate.

I love this place