I need to take some time to investigate all this but I think the crux of my problem here is that in C# I do not have a way to specify the COM version. C# does not use CreateObject. In C# and 79X life was good all I had to do to start a new instance of the cell editor and open it was to say:
CellEditorAddinLib.CellEditorDlg cellEd = new CellEditorAddinLib.CellEditorDlg();
CellEditorAddinLib.CellDB cellDB = cellEd.OpenDatabase(lib, false);
that's far more simple and straight forward than the mess this has become. Hopefully I can find a C# guru here at work and find an equivalent command to createobject that lets me specify the COM version.