manually launched factory server?

While debugging my Bonobo code, it's often useful to be able to launch a 
server manually rather than letting bonobo-activation-server do it. 
Right now I've got a simple GenericFactory-based server and a client 
that uses bonobo_get_object() to get an interface followed by 
bonobo_object_release_unref() to release it later.

If the server is launched behind the scenes by bonobo-activation-server, 
all works well.  But if I have manually run the server process before 
starting the client, then the client's call to 
bonobo_object_release_unref() yields a rather uninformative CORBA error:

     Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

The server subsequently exits, as intended, with no errors reported on 
its side.

What's going wrong here?  Why does the behavior change depending on who 
launched the server?  Is launching a server executable directly like 
this simply not allowed, or does this error suggest that am I doing 
something else wrong?