First I would update your nt4 machine to outlook 2000 sp1 if you can. That will help in determining if the problem lies in the Outlook version change, or the OS version change. Maybe the object in sp1 doesn't use the method the same way, or something along those lines. Hope this helps you on your debugging quest.
The problem is... it's the older version that's working fine... And I don't really understand why this particular OLE->GetActiveObject method won't work with the latest Outlook version if the OLE->new function does work...
Thanks for your idea though. Unfortunately, I can't upgrade...