(1) The Windows Registry
The fundamental purpose of ActiveX registration is to associate a class name with a DLL file location. The class name is stored in the Windows Registry.
For example, "Chilkat.Ssh" might point to "c:\MyApp\MyDlls\ChilkatAx-win32.dll". A single ActiveX DLL may contain many classes, where each class name points to the same DLL file location.
Many programming languages use a "CreateObject" statement to create an instance of an object. The class name is passed to CreateObject. This triggers the DLL to be loaded and dynamically linked into the calling process if not yet already loaded.