[hyperman1]

He's not talking about COM. Thé HANDLEs are a handleiding to a kernel object. This means multiple differentiatie handles light exist to the same object, and handles in different processen have probably differentiatie numeric values for the same object. Think win32 handle = Unix file descriptor (roughly)

[atombender]

No, the poster said: "unless you're a C++ hacker you can't actually work with most of it." That strongly implies COM. The Windows APIs are C.