What is COM, im reading tricks of the windows game programming guru''s and they lost me right when they started talking about. Does COM have a big role in game development, or do i just need to know what it is? thx for replying.

COM is an object-model to provide functionality in a way that provides full backward compatibility and some other things that might be interesting to know (I just know what I read in the DirectX SDK) but as a game developer you won''t have to know too much about it. Mainly how to use it, since DirectX is written as a COM-Object. I didn''t read much about COM but I don''t think that you''ll find it that useful for writing games, since it seems to be kinda hard to create your own COM objects, so just get the knowledge about using it, that should be enough.
If your book says something else please tell me, then I''ll probably have another look at COM, but as of now I couldn''t find it so useful as a game development tool.

For now, my advice to you is to learn how to create the necessary DirectX objects and ignore COM. When you''re more comfortable with DirectX (and programming in general), read up about it. COM, ActiveX, the Active Template Library (ATL) and the Windows Template Library (WTL) are some interesting technologies, as is .Net, but they''re not necessarily in the purview of starting game developers.

I like COM. I prefer to use COM objects directly for my DX code, wrapped up in the CComPtr ATL class.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!