There are not many good reasons this would fail, especially the regsvr32 step. Run dumpbin /exports on that dll. If you don’t see DllRegisterServer then you’ve got a corrupt install. It should have more side-effects, you wouldn’t be able to build C/C++ projects anymore.
One standard failure mode is running this on a 64-bit operating system. This is 32-bit unmanaged code, you would indeed get the ‘class not registered’ exception. Project + Properties, Build tab, change Platform Target to x86.