Chris Brumme - Common Language Runtime

Technical Blog: "Advice is:

1) If you are a server application, calling ReleaseComObject may be an important and necessary requirement for getting good throughput. This is especially true if the COM objects live in a Single Threaded Apartment (STA). For example, ASP compatibility mode uses the DCOM STA threadpool. In these scenarios, you would create a COM object, use it, then eagerly call ReleaseComObject on each request.

2) If you are a client application using a modest number of COM objects that are passed around freely in your managed code, you should not use ReleaseComObject. You would likely inflict Disconnected errors on parts of the application by doing so. The performance benefit of eagerly cleaning up the resources isn�t worth the problems you are causing.

3) If you have a case where you are creating COM objects at a high rate, passing them around freely, choking the Finalizer thread, and consuming a lot of unmanaged resources� you are out of luck."