calling IUrlHistory when explorer is not running?

Calling for example IUrlHistoryStg seems to access the memory-mapped version of index.dat which is held by Explorer.

Could this API ever possibly work without Explorer running? (but with the user logged-on which is necess开发者_开发知识库ary as this API only works for the calling user)

When you create the UrlHistory object, it will load the file on demand (and create a cached version in a global for your process). If you can get this interface (either through CoCreate or QueryInterface) then you're good to go.