Two of our programs use the same COM server (also made by us) with the same class ids. Each program when installing copies the COM server files into its folder and regsvr32s the COM server.

The problem is how to install the COM server so that the user can install either one or both of our programs into different folders in any order and likely of different versions. Clearly it's impossible without changing the class ids and that's lots of hassle with configurations. Ideally we would like to use manifests for that and go without regsvr32.

The problem is every time I read about reg-free COM (for example, here) there's the version attribute in the assemblyIdentity. The version number should change every nightly build and I totally don't like the idea of (automatically) adjusting it. I understand why specifying dependency on a specific version is good, but it's completely useless in our scenarion.

Is there a way to write manifests for both the COM server and the consumer so that they don't specify versions and just work with whatever version of the file happens to be in the folder? Also is there a way to restrict the search to the same folder as the consumer?