[Dwedit]

The original purpose of the registry was to tell COM where to look for a DLL file given a GUID. Then COM could create instances of objects.

You still see that in there with HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.

You can technically create objects without the registry, if you load up the DLL, then call the exported functions to create a Factory object, then use the factory object to create instances. It's what COM itself does.