# The Component Categories Manager

To facilitate the handling of component categories and to guarantee consistency of the Registry, the system provides the Component Categories Manager, a COM object with a CLSID of CLSID_StdComponentCategoriesManager. This COM object provides these interfaces:

- ICatInformation

- ICatRegister

ICatInformation provides methods for obtaining information about the categories implemented or required by a certain class, and provides information about the categories registered on a given machine.

ICatRegister provides methods for registering and unregistering component cagetory information in the Registry. This includes both the human-readable names of categories and the categories implemented or required by a given component or class.