ActiveX totally broken

[ricardo]

I was recently called to look at a friends PC becuase of a problem in
IE6 running on XP Home SP2. She was starting to get a lot ofweb-pages
opening with "red-X" placeholders in a number of places, her kids
couldn't play on-line games, etc.

Did the usual checks in MSIE to ensure appropriate security settings
but no joy- I suspected corruption in Flash or Shockwave andwas
suspicious on running a system scan to find a whole heap of spyware,
trojans, etc that I picked through to remove. However, reinstalling
shockwave and flash didn't work. Temporarily disabling all secondary
browser objects and helpers didn't help, etc.

Further investigation I found that the system was a lot sicker - for
example, I tried to backtrack the machine a couple of weeks back only
to be greeted by a completely blank window where the sytstem restore
dialog should be. tried sfc but this just hung. Went to windowsupdate
to find a blank page. At ths point I did a few other checks and found
that many things on the machine that used ActiveX didn't seem to work
problem, it was as if ActiveX was completely corruted, disabled or
something.

I finally "fixed" the problem by doing an in-place reinstall of XP
which seemed a bit drastic but at least I knew it would work, which it
did.

Was there an easier way to patch up ActiveX to get it working again?
Any ideas what might have killed it in the first place?

 

[Guest]

I don't know if this would have completely fixed the ActiveX problem, if that
was the main issue, (sounds logical to me thought) but, I had an issuse
recently with a family member's computer that sounds similar. I don't recall
where it was that I went to, but there was a section in either Norton or in
Windows that I had checked blocking banners, etc. and that was the issue. It
saw that pics, etc. as banners and wouldn't allow them. It works fine now.
Hope that helps a little.

RAGMAN!!!