Probably not; I (happily) haven't had to fight OLE battles for a few years...

I seem to recall that there's a DDESpy equivalent for OLE (or maybe you can use DDESpy to watch OLE traffic?). If so, you might be able to watch what a test VB application sends for that call, and then duplicate it yourself...

My only other suggestion would be to use VT_UI1 instead of VT_I2, and see if that works, since you're only expecting one byte to be returned and not 2... That's based on a quick look at the docs, not any personal expertise with this module, I'm afraid.
--
Mike