Run ActiveXObject COM component that creates dialogs under IIS in Asp.NET

Question

I have a ASP.NET MVC app, hosted on IIS on a dedicated server. At some point I need to create a com activex component. I use Interaction.CreateObject from Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction for this.

The issue is that this activex component shows some dialogs when starting and waits until they are closed before actually registering as COM component.

I wrote some simple code that closes the windows via Windows API using FindWindowEx etc. and it works on a dev machine when hosted under VS, but it looks like on IIS these windows are never shown even in Windows API and ActiveX component just freezes waiting for dialogs to close that never exist.

I tried:

1. Using Process.Start and then Interaction.GetObject instead of Interaction.CreateObject
2. Setting AppPool in IIS to run from a real user identity
3. Setting Load User Profile to True in IIS
4. Using https://github.com/mj1856/SimpleImpersonation library to run the code as a user
5. I also looked in dcomcnfg (and this is my best bet on what I need to do). I thought I need to find my COM component there, and set Identity to specific user - but for some reason the ActiveX COM component I'm running does not exist there. I see "cannot register COM component" in Event Viewer if the component run crashes by timeout (because it waits for dialogs before registering as COM), - so I know AppID, but it does not exist in the list in dcomcnfg. Maybe because the ActiveX is exe, not ocx?

I know IIS is not supposed to run anything with windows, and it of course cannot show them, but I was at least expecting to see them with Windows API and being able to close them, especially given that the component waits for them to be closed, so they exist somewhere. I think I'm missing some clever setup on the server.