Modifying/Adding Side-By-Side Assembly search sequence

Question

This question is a bit similar to this one, except for a little twist : Can I modify the side-by-side assembly search sequence?

We have a couple different softwares, made with different languages, that talk to each other when they run. To achieve this we made .NET COM objects that we load using Registration-Free COM Activation. This works well. Some of the languages we use can't load COMs, so we made a C++ Wrapper DLL that uses ACTCTX to activate the COMs from their embeded manifests. Also working well.

But now, we have a case where our C++ Wrapper is loaded by code that is ran by an application that isn't ours (let's call it the runtime) that is located somewhere and our application is located somewhere else. We'd rather deploy our COM objects at the same place as application is deployed rather than next to the runtime application.

Not that it is important as the concept remains the same, but the runner is FourJ's Genero (fgl.exe) and the code that calls our C++ wrapper are in .42m files. The runner (fgl.exe) is installed with Genero, by default in Program Files\FourJs and our applications are in another directory with our company's name ie : Program Files\MyCompany

This is similar to what you'd get with Java. Runtime at one place, applcation somewhere else.

So in our case, our .42m loads the C++ Wrapper properly, the wrappers activates the COM (located in the same directory as our .42m and the wrapper) properly but once we try to instanciate an object, we get a "80070002" file not found error.

I've read Assembly Searching Sequence and noticed the described behavior using Process Monitor.

So what happens is, since ultimately it's fgl.exe that is running, the Windows Side-By-Side loader looks into :

1. C:\Program Files(x86)\FourJs\fgl\gen2.50\bin\MyCom.dll
2. C:\Program Files(x86)\FourJs\fgl\gen2.50\bin\MyCom.dll\MyCom.dll

While my COM is really inside of C:\Program Files(x86)\MyCompany\MyApplication\MyCom.dll

To confirm the behavior, we copied the COM in the same directory as fgl.exe and as expected, it works.

So i would like to be able to add a Search Directory to my Activation Context so that it looks for this DLL in my deployment directory. Is this possible ? If i can't find another solution, we'll end up deploying our COMs inside of that directory, but that's just not the right.

Thanks