Newbie seeks help with COM? DLLs?

[Sam Hunting]

Background: I'm operating in a VB/NT shop, but I want to introduce a Python
solution for the sake of doing *extremely* rapid development of GUI widgets.

(When you have a layout manager as in Tkinter, you don't spend a lot of time
manually tweaking layouts in VB's IDE. In fact, you don't even need to worry
about entering coordinate points, so it would be very easy to create a
data-(XML) driven widget factory.)

We need to incorporate the widgets into an existing software product so
that, for example, a Python-developed dialog will appear, into which the
user will enter data, which is then passed back to the application.

Now here is where my newbie nature takes over, since I am very new to
Python, and even newer to the VB/NT/Windows worlds -- how "incorporate"?

The software product understands DLLs, and also understands COM. I've had it
suggested to me that the way to get where I need to do, is to turn the
dialogs into COM servers, and then call them from the software application,
which is the client.

(1) I worked through the "Quick Start to Server Side COM and Python", and
registered the Hello World server successfully. Can anyone point me to some
VB code that would enable me to test the test server?

(2) If the COM approach is not the right approach, can someone suggest a
better one? And point me to some sample code that I can test, run, and
improve to help me solve the problem?

I thought the hard part would be learning enough of Python to construct the
widgets -- and now the widgets are constructed, and even some factory
machinery. But the hard part turned out to be the easy part.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Sam Hunting