Hmmmm, the shown arguments *against* the shlib approach which impressed me most and which make me think that we should re-think it are the KApplication and the i18n issue. This are *very* strong arguments IMHO. So perhaps we should keep the current layer (components on a per-process basis) and dive one layer deeper, the ORB: Perhaps we should concentrate on what Torben once mentioned: Invest time in hacking the IDL compiler and our own (de)marshalling code, in order to be able to a) create smart stub/skeleton code (optimised for the qt/kde framework!) b) use qtl where possible c) have qt/kde bindings. this would have the outrageous advantage that programming with CORBA becomes *much* easier, as developers won't have to deal with the MICO/CORBA types (sequence, CORBA::WChar*, etc.) but can stay with the existing ones. What do you think? Ciao, Simon