Does com4j work with registration-free COM on amd64?

I'm successfully using com4j to connect with someone else's 32-bit COM
component that has been registered with regsvr32.
It all works well, so, many thanks to everyone at com4j for that!

However, the 64-bit version of this component is distributed as
registration-free, with manifest files.

I've tried to get this to work, but so far, no luck, it always fails on
CoCreateInstance.

So my question is this: should it be possible to get a
registration-free COM component working with com4j on 64-bit Windows 7,
or is the internal mechanism different and my attempts are doomed to
failure?

Thanks.
Gordon.