What is Active X and How to troubleshoot it?
July 25, 2008
Computer errors may occur any time and cause unnecessary problems and frustrations. Active X problems also fall in category of errors that may cause trouble on your system at times.
Before seeing how and why ActiveX problems occur, it would be good to see what ActiveX is, how it works and what its functions are on your computer.
Based on the object-oriented programming technology, ActiveX is used to package small software programs as objects that can be embedded in various applications to perform specific tasks. ActiveX objects can be written using many different programming languages, out of which Visual Basic is most commonly used by programmers. Component Object Model (COM) is used to develop ActiveX controls that are embedded in different applications using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology.
The main benefit of the ActiveX technology is that you can create software modules that can be used on several different applications. ActiveX controls are mainly used by Web developers to incorporate different interactions and features in the Web pages they create. For example, these controls can be used to add animations, pop-up menus, and other interactions in Web pages.
ActiveX controls use the OLE technology that was primarily designed to be used by a single user on a single machine. This is the reason why not much was done to make the technology secure. Now, as ActiveX technology is used to share objects across network and over the Internet, OLE has become a major security vulnerability for the technology. To work around this issue, Microsoft has enhanced the security of Internet Explorer to display an ActiveX confirmation message that asks users to confirm whether or not they want to download the ActiveX control, the page they are accessing is trying to download to the system. In case, you choose not to download an ActiveX control, “ActiveX not working” error may display. To modify the way your Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls, in the Internet Explorer window, open the Tools menu and then select Internet Options. On the Security tab, click the Custom level button. In the Security Settings – Internet Zone dialog box, search ActiveX options and select the required options to enable or disable the settings as per your requirement.
Active X problems may also occur if a system file is incorrectly configured and requires to be reset to enable it to rectify its configuration.
To do this, open Start menu, select Run, type regsvr32 msxml3.dll and then press Enter. Now, close restart Internet Explorer. Doing this often helps in resolving ActiveX errors by reconfiguring the file that may be generating the errors.
ActiveX update problem is quite a recent problem that started occurring after a recent ActiveX update was released by Microsoft to settle a patent dispute. The update changes the way in which Internet Explorer handles the ActiveX controls that are loaded by the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements. After you install this update, you can interact with these ActiveX controls only after you have activated the user interface for these controls. If you fail to do this, the ActiveX update error may be displayed. Initially, many Internet programs, such as Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.3 or 1.4 and Google toolbar generated errors soon after the update was installed. However, a workaround of this issue has been incorporated in the latest versions of these programs. Therefore, you can resolve these issues by updating the program that is generating the error.
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