What do the return values from the Release or AddRef methods mean?
The return value will be the current reference count of the object. However, the COM specification states that you should not rely on this and the value is generally only available for debugging purposes. The values you observe may be unexpected since various other system objects may be holding references to the DirectX objects you create. For this reason, you should not write code that repeatedly calls Release until the reference count is zero, as the object may then be freed even though another component may still be referencing it.
