Is it this actually necessary?

Question

[STAThread] Single Thread Apartment

Answer 1

For Windows Forms applications, yes. There is a good explanation on the MSDN site: "STAThreadAttribute indicates that the COM threading model for the application is single-threaded apartment. This attribute must be present on the entry point of any application that uses Windows Forms; if it is omitted, the Windows components might not work correctly. If the attribute is not present, the application uses the multithreaded apartment model, which is not supported for Windows Forms."