The
ROT is the
running object table in
Windows. It lets you know which
COM objects still have a
ref count of higher than
zero. There is a
tool, called ROT viewer (
IROTVIEW application) that gets installed with
visual studio. If you look up the
GUIDs that still have
ref counts, you can reverse look them up in the
registry to see what is running. So if you launch an app that uses COM components (
Excel,
Word,
Powerpoint, etc), you can turn on the ROT viewer and see that the GUID for
Excel.Application (or Word.Application, or what not)is running.
What does this mean? That means all of those
arcane numbers in the registry look up to being
different applications with COM components.