Assuming there is a big application built using C++ & others and CORBA as a way of interacting with it, is there any viable way of simulating user interaction, with the goal of running ANY kind of automated testing (the automation is less of an issue)?
The preferred approach would involve using JAVA, but that is also less of an issue.
Google provides almost nothing on this.
IONA (now owned by Progress) built a product called the Orbix Code Generation Toolkit that does exactly this. It's available in Orbix v3 through v6.
It walks your IDL documents and produces client (or even server) code to completely exercise and call each method available with random but valid values for each parameter, printing them out each time.
You'll need to get Orbix to use it, but maybe you can get an eval license for it to try it out by contacting Progress Software. And don't worry, you can generate client code that can run against any CORBA-compatible server, not just Orbix ones.