Pythoncom shutdown problems

[Hannes Grund]

Dear all,
probably offtopic for the general python list, but I don't know were to go
else.

I'm currently developing somekind of middleware
wich makes heavy use of pythonwin/com extensions.
(The complete setup is: win2000/winXP, python2.2,
win32all-152, wxPython resp. wxWindows).

The software is aimed to manage data held by a software
suite (called chemoffice) to manage chemical substances.
It exposes it main components via COM, the intagration
to python via win32com.client.Dispatch works well.
The problem:

When calling a special method on some of these COM objects
one component launches a process which appears to be a subprocess
of svchost.exe.
The result is that I'm unable to terminate the python process
after this process has been started, furthermore if
I shutdown the python process manually, it keeps alive, causing
problems during windows shutdown (i.e. you have to remove
it manually as well).

Any help or hint would be highly appreciated,

thanks in advance,
  Hannes Grund