Every once in a while, usualy after getting luled into a false sense of understanding and confidence, Microsoft's functions and COM interfaces smack me on the back side of the head as if to say "hey idiot - you forgot to read the fine print on this interface and mysticly infer that while the function, whose sole purpose is to get a valid interface pointer, did not fail simply because it returned a NULL interface pointer"

Excuse me, but Huh?

It would be as if you had a
HRESULT IColorWheel::GetPanatoneObject(IPanatone** ppPanatoneResult);
That returned S_OK but ppPanatoneResult was invalid (null).
All I can conclude is that it's a successful failure?

::sigh::

Update: I'm a dumbass - I was forgetting about S_FALSE (0x00000001), and it was the cause of my successfull failure.