backdating this to when i spoke to KK. He was trying to call an obsolete COM component from Java, and was using JACOB [1]. I’ve not used it myself, but it sounds like a good way if you REALLY REALLY REALLY need to call COM. I hate it, cos once you have JNI with COM, you can’t really run it on non-Windows platform without a change.
If REALLY necessary, eg. interacting with a hardware device, I recommend building an adapter interface (pattern) for the component, so that another adapter implementation can be written when you port it to another OS, and a driver for that OS exists.