R – Who owns returned BSTR

When you call a COM function with strings or VARIANTs in most cases the only garantuee needed is that those objects are available throughout the call itself. After the call, the object itself is responsible for making copies of the data. For example VARIANT's will most likely use the VariantCopy function that will copy strings, copy COM objects (increases reference count). The only thing you should worry about is when you pass an actual interface in the VARIANT: in that case the interface should be properly reference counted, and QueryInterface, AddRef, and Release should all be implemented accordingly. And don't ever deallocate that object before the reference count reaches 0 ;)

EDIT: Oh, and if you want to learn more about COM programming, be sure to get "Essential COM" by "Don Box". Don Box is the COM guru, and that book will teach you almost anything you would ever want to know about COM and more ;)

If you're using Microsofts ATL, you can use the CComBSTR class. It will accept a char* and create a BSTR from it, also, you don't need to worry about deleting the BSTR, all that happens in the dtor for CComBSTR.

Also, see Matthew Xaviers answer, it doesn't look like you're passing your array of strings into that function properly.

Hope this helps