Greetings
This is rather interesting, (as a figure of speech) because I am struggling with a similar problem with a perl/apache/COM setup. It goes like this:

1. Script sits in a loop, polling a free-threaded COM server to return a resource and sleeping when it does not get one
2. After 4/5 iterations, the call into COM (that's in Win32::OLE) locks up (i.e. never returns): Perl.exe just hangs around until killed.

Same thing is not reproducible from within the debugger so some signal/event/threading model snafu appears to be responsible... what, exactly, beats me. And, how does one go about debugging such a problem?

Cheers,
alf