>How is that? Don't to sound stupid, that is if by factory you don't mean a >building or set of buildings with facilities for manufacturing...

Basically a factory is an interface for creating classes. It's a design pattern name given to a structure for creating related classes without hard coding the class names. (They might come from a table.)
So, if you make sandwiches, you get some bread, cut it, put some meat in it, wrap it and collect the money.
Each time I used the word "some", the specifics would depend on the type of sandwich you are making so that would be a custom class instantiation but you are essentially going through the same steps. (The bread could be whole wheat or white but you still can cut it) The factory would handle the custom instantiations.
This may not be the "Perfect" definition but I think it gets the concept out.