Mocking SAO

I have been unit testing a class that interacted via Remoting with a Singleton. I wished to eliminate the remoting part and use a mock object for the singleton. There was one hinge to that: One of the singleton's public methods returns a Hashtable. The Remoting automatically took care of serializing the hashtable and recreating it at the client. However, when I started using the singleton directly (in the same assembly) as the class under test, the hashtable was returned by reference causing undesired side-effects when the class under test started manipulating the hashtable!

More on the solution shortly...


P.s.
Same problem arrises for SingleCall objects and CAOs.