LOL that COM works badly with C++. Who wants to use that language anyway?
Jeezus, berend, what world do you live in? Name a major piece of software that isn't written in some variant of C (C,C++,Obj-C). I can only think of a couple, and they are mostly Java-based. And there's Zope, which is written in Python. (And an argument can be made that Java is simply another dialect of C.) And pointers may contribute to buffer overflows, but they also make libraries like the STL and BOOST possible. Don't knock these libraries if you haven't used them -- they are huge productivity enhancers if you use them correctly.
Just remember, pointers are like superhuman powers: with great power comes great responsibility!
But if you really dislike C/C++, you can go to Python -- it's a truly OO language, but is far better designed than, say, Java. It also works well as a "glue" layer in scripts, and it's in that role that I use it rather than Perl. You can write libraries in C and import then into Python with wrappers. In fact Python itself is written in C! (And so is Java, for that matter.)
Once you get beyond the edge tools, berend, almost everything on both Unix and Windows is written in either C or C++.
By the way: I wasn't saying that C++ was bad. My argument was that Microsoft crippled COM in it's native environment (C/C++) to make it interoperate with braindead languages like VB (and Delphi!).