When a stub manager is created, its Object Identifier (OID) is registered with COM's distributed garbage collector, which currently is implemented by the OXID Resolver service. The OR keeps track of which OIDs are exported from each apartment on the local host machine.

On the thirteenth of April in the year 1785 I was sitting in a ditch in Derbyshire, convinced I was dying.

The ditch was unremarkable: a straggly hawthorn hedge behind a damp, stony bottom full of the usual crawly things, a fringe of grass in front and beyond that the rutted road. I was not particularly remarkable either: I suppose I looked then like any undersized lad who was both starving and cold. In fact the only thing that made us of note was that our temporary and unsought association seemed about to become a permanence: the ditch would soon be elevated to the distinction of a grave whilst I should be reduced to the provision of the corpse.

'Merde, alors!' I said. Loudly. That wretched apple was still just out of reach.

At the very end of the last branch of the last tree in the orchard, the one that hung precariously over the high wall that surrounded our chateau, was an apple that had been missed in the annual picking, and it was the reddest, ripest one. I deserved something special to mark my birthday, especially since everyone else was far too busy preparing for our Visitor to remember that the youngest daughter of the Marquis de Villeneuve was fourteen years old today: St Luke's Day, 18 October 1787.