I will say that I'm surprised no other LLM picked this up, since the issue should be somewhat evident to people familiar with C++ and how COM works. COM APIs cannot represent "owned" strings.

Still better than whatever JS rats nest they came up with for the new Outlook.

What do you mean by "owned" strings?

WinRT, which is ultimately just an evolution of COM, has HSTRING which can own the data inside it (as well as contain a reference to an existing chunk of memory with fast-pass strings).