I am not entirely sure about all your project circumstances, but given tha fact you tagged your question as a vb.net question, maybe the following article might be of some help to you:
It's a little bit old, but still might prove usefull: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973807.aspx
So the goal would be to create your Component as a dll Project and then Add this to the project references of any project that is supposed to utilize the functionality of said dll component. Once that is done you just need to make sure the dll ships with the Program later.