Thank you traveller and matt.
I am using Office 2000 though so had hoped that OLE would behave itself. I think that one of you might be right --it may be due to an unhealthy interaction with some other software such as VNC(i'm not running vnc by the way but something like that). I have also heard that some anti-virus add-ons could be responsible.
Unfortunately as the server that i am trying to configure the DCOM script for is a live production server, i do not have the authority to disable/uninstall certain services such as anti-virus to ascertain the effect that this might have.
Thanks anyway for your help.