The APE Manager and all of its component services can run on either a single Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 (or later) machine. If your APE test uses remote components, those workers and services must be located on a Windows NT machine in order to support distributed COM (DCOM).
The connection choice configures the remoting option for all of the object classes used by the Application Performance Explorer. You can choose from either DCOM or Remote Automation.