How do I enable ActiveX controls in Windows XP or Windows 7?

Question

My friend has a desktop with Windows XP installed, and he does not have a UPS set up. Yesterday, the power went out and the PC underwent a hard shutdown. This caused a problem, (ntldr disappeared), but this was fixed by using an XP repair disk.

After he logged in again after the repair, he wanted to change some services, so he went to services.msc and got an error saying Your currently security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page. As a result, page can't display correctly. as shown in this picture:

I ran a search on Google for the error, and found a registry edit, but it failed to solve the problem. The suggestion was to change the value of the 1200 key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0 from one to zero, but it was already at zero, so I set it to one, restarted, then set it back to zero and restarted again.

The same thing happened to me a few months ago on Windows 7, but I didn't notice it and formatted my OS for other reasons.

How can I get rid of this error message?

Answer 1

My guess is that you have file corruption. I would first do a chkdsk /f at least a couple of times (most people don't realize that you often need to run this more than once), and if I still had problems, then I would do a System Restore too.

Here is how to check your chkdsk results:

http://www.cpucare.net/OS/XP/Viewing%20ChkDSk%20Results.htm

They never stop reporting finding some things, but when it gets down to finding only around 5 items, is when I stop running it.

Answer 2

The services.msc in Extended view (tabs at the bottom) uses a HTML page and in it an ActiveX to display the services. If you use the Standard version, no HTML is used and you should be able to control the services. Not a real fix, but at least you can control the services for now.

As Internet Explorer is itself based on a lot of ActiveX control (see Wikipedia), an error in one of them can render the entire browser useless. This would also match the error that you even can’t start it.

The first thing would be a check of all system files used by Windows. Enter this command into Start - Run

SFC.EXE /SCANNOW

(more details here)

If this does not work, try to update Internet Explorer to a newer version. I have seen a lot of broken IE6 installations with weird error messages that went away when installing Internet Explorer 7 or 8 - download here.

Answer 3

It is an internet explorer message. Try going to internet explorer/internet options/security, and set it as low as possible (you might want to turn off protected mode).