Change in IE COM behavior

[Chris Prinos]

I had for some time been using the win32com.client package to control
MS Internet Explorer, but recently have seen a change in it's
behavior. What used to happen is that each time I called
win32com.client.Dispatch('InternetExplorer.Application') I would get a
new instance of the browser.

Now when I do it, I get attached to the topmost _existing_ browser
window (could be an IE window, or an explorer window). Subsequent
calls attach to the same instance, rather than creating new ones. It
is probably some recent installation/update that caused this, but I'm
not sure where to start looking... has anyone seen this before?

I'm running Python 2.1 (ActiveState build 211) with win2k (latest
service pak applied) and IE 5.5.

Chris