Excel COM automation

[Bjorn Pettersen]

We have a trivially simple Python app in production that loads Excel
through COM, opens an Excel file, and saves it as tab-delimited. Today
we had a silent failure, and tracked it down to two instances of our app
trying to use the Excel object at the same time. Is this supposed to
work (and if so, what steps are we missing)? And if it's not supposed to
work, is there a way to determine that the COM object is "busy"?

-- bjorn