Who’s living in what apartment?

It’s the COM apartment models. They’re related to the threads that make use of COM objects. What happens is that when you initialize COM for a specific thread you declare that it’s either Apartment Threaded (AKA Single Threaded Apartment) or Multi Threaded.
When you use the Apartment threading model, it means that the COM object is isolated within the thread that created it. The most important piece of information about this model is that you should never use that object in another thread – it causes brokenness.
When you use the multi-threading model, what you’re pretty much saying is that I’m probably going to use this COM object in several threads. The way it works is that a multi threaded model, then the context is shared within the process.
The model you support also puts extra complications on you, the creator of the object. COM objects with a declared MT support must use some synchronization to protect shared information within the object, otherwise you’ll suffer from data corruption due to threads walking over the data. You don’t have any of these considerations in a Single threaded model – you’re guaranteed safe and sane interactions.
Additionally, when you’re in COM land, remember never just WaitFor*, but instead MsgWaitFor* things. This also applies to using DDE. This is because the Apartment model uses windows messages under the hood.