[BrianLy]

I don't think they would install a service to start the helper program. Service and desktop interaction has been changed since Vista. IIRC this was to prevent the shatter attack that allowed Window messages to be passed between services and applications. I haven't looked but I think it could add the helper to the startup items for a user, or create a scheduled task.

You don't have to use regsvr32. Registration-free COM (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973913.aspx) has been around for a while. I wonder why this was not used, or if there is a limitation with certain types of COM objects.