Help: Searching for classes that support a given interface

This question concerns c++ and vb because the COM interface in question is not available to VB programmers.

I want to search for those classes that implement some interface. The hard way would be to query the entire registry, but there must be another way.

I've read where you can setup component categories and then search using ICatInformation. Problem is, ICatInformation is not available to VB. This interface is derived from comcat.dll, and the IDL definition is available in the include directory for c++ developers.

Can I create a type library from Microsoft's IDL file to make ICatInformation available to VB?

How do I go about that? I've tried MIDL, but I think I screwed that up somewhere along the line.

The final result of this is to develop functionally similar components based upon a single COM interface. Then, depending on the functionality requested by a client, I could configure accordingly. Display a list of components based upon the interface (the reason for searching), and then make a selection.