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In theory the manifest could be external (app.exe -> app.exe.manifest; lib.dll -> lib.dll.manifest), but you already seem to be patching the binary so maybe embedding it directly as a resource wouldn't hurt. Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/SbsCs/assemb... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/SbsCs/applic...

I came here to also post about regfree COM. If you can get it to work that seems like the ideal solution.

“Activation contexts enable COM objects to be used without requiring that they be registered.”

This is how we avoided COM registration for Blowfish in YR, maybe this well help you.

> configure it at build time

There's a plain old API to create lookup scopes, IIRC.