COM Object Handling Differences Between 2008 Express And VB 2008?

I recently created a very simple project in VB express 2008 to interface with a COM object from an external vendor. I then downloaded the VS2008 90 day trial and found that the identical code in a VS2008 project results in a COMException error "Object is out of scope". Is anyone aware of any differences in how the two packages handle COM object interfaces as I have run out of ideas. Both projects have identical code and all the references are the same. The CreateObject() method correctly creates the object, but any attempt to access methods inside the COM object result in that error. I can even open the VB 2008 Express project inside VS and it still generates the same error.

Here is the code - the vendor dll in question is from Siebel v8.0.0, you'll notice that I have commented out most of the code that comes after the error. Creating a watch in the debugger on the siebApp variable sees it correctly created as {System.__ComObject}type SiebelHTMLApplication. I first tried this by creating the Property Service for variable siebSvcs, but after I started experiencing the COMExceptions, I reverted to using the most basic method inside the COM object I was creating.

Imports
SIEBELHTMLLib
Public

[code]......