Is anyone successfully using registration-free COM with .NET components?

Question

Until recently, we were happily using registration-free COM for our native and .NET COM components. However, we ran into a weird issue where our application started crashing

Answer 1

We're using registration-free COM for both native and .NET components. We decided to use a fixed assembly version number for these components (mainly to prevent cluttering the registry when repeatedly regasm-ing .NET components that had a dynamic build number/*). Not ideal but we have other ways of determining which version of a given component is being used (they're never patched individually).

That sounds like a very nasty issue indeed! That KB article almost makes it seem like using SxS is optional... As far as I know it's the only way to do reg-free COM?