Yeah...COM....yuck. However, ALL of the Crystal and BusinessObjects .NET classes are just wrappers for the underlying COM classes. So, even when you're not building a UFL, if you're using Crystal, you're using COM.
FYI, because .NET is not very good at garbage collecting with COM objects, you need to be sure to either wrap your calls to the Crystal classes in "Using" clauses or explicitly call .Dispose() on the object when you're finished with it.
-Dell