ACTIVE X ?

pazuzu

This is a good place to learn about your security settings in Internet Explorer.

Link:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/security/settings.asp

 

Is the image below the IE message you are referring to?

If that is it, then fixing it may not be something you want to do. You see, that message means that your PC is set more securely than the webpage you are viewing requires to run all the elements contained in it. That message is telling you there is at least one ActiveX control that is not being allowed to run based upon your settings in IE's > Tools > Internet Options > Security... (specifically the settings for Activex controls and plug-ins).

While you can stop those messages from popping up by lowering your security, by doing so you would open your PC up to a whole world of possible malicious ActiveX controls. The most powerful spyware programs and dialers are installed through the use of ActiveX controls. ActiveX is a terribly powerful thing and therefore is a very dangerous and exploitable thing.

One big problem using IE and securing it properly is that Microsoft does not allow you to prevent that warning message from coming up when an ActiveX control is blocked. It's one of the few messages that doesn't have one of those don't warning me again type check boxes, and it really ought to. Some people have speculated that Microsoft so wanted people to enable ActiveX that this message was their way of trying to annoy people into enabling it. Unfortunately, since that time up through today, ActiveX has been so widely exploited to hijack and damage systems that it really makes Microsoft look foolish for having an annoying message like that which can't be disabled.

Interestingly enough, the tighter your security, the more of those messages you'll get while using Internet Explorer. Adding sites to your restricted zone will cause all ActiveX controls accessed from those sites to produce a popup message like that. (There are some sites where you get many such popups all at once because they are heavily loaded with ActiveX.)

SpywareBlaster adds sites to the restricted zone, too, so it also can be a cause of some of these popups, however, it also sets kill-bits for many known bad ActiveX controls, and I believe having the kill-bit set prevents those messages from coming up, as well. So, in that regard SpywareBlaster helps to reduce the number of those alerts. A Hosts file will also prevent many of these since they entirely block many spyware related sites and therefore their ActiveX controls are never accessed.

Many people have asked about finding a way to just prevent that popup alert window, unfortunately I don't think anyone has found one short of really hacking up IE.

Of course, switching to a non-IE browser would solve this problem entirely.