voodoo with COM

Voodoo with COM! Yes, to work with COM you need some voodooing. For instance, if you just want to have an application to change the navigation in an IE instance, you will need voodooing and it won't work. I tried getActiveObject to get a running instance of IE and, of course, it doesn't work. I tried then to create a new IE object but when I try a simple IWebBrowser2 method like navigate I get a nice "unknown runtime error" with error code 0x80004005. The event viewer says "
Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 7.0.5346.5, faulting module ssv.dll, version 5.0.60.5, fault address 0x0000248b." Is it because it's IE 7 beta? Probably not.
Regardless, it's very difficult to work with COM to do basic tasks. What if all I want is to talk to a running instance? getActiveObject and its ROTten table don't seem to work, and I tried in more than one occasion.