Active X Controls Question

[Tyler Yaccarino]

I am helping out a friend who owns a medical practice, and the software that he is using via Internet Explorer is trying to install ActiveX controls. For some reason, these controls will not install no matter how many related settings I change, and the recommendations of the software company have not worked.

I was going to try doing a clean install of Windows 10 in hopes to fix whatever is preventing the ActiveX controls to install.

Does anyone else have an idea of what's going on?

 

[ko888]

Microsoft stripped ActiveX support out of Windows 10 because they didn't want their new Edge browser to support old technologies anymore.

 

[Eximo]

IE 11 is still available in Windows 10 and it still supports Active X. You may have to navigate to the executable and run it.

Enterprise mode and Compatibility modes are your best bet, but simultaneously you may need to run IE as an administrator to get some active X controls to install.

It is kind of a crap shoot, but your friend should start looking for his vendor to update their software or find a new product to use. Active X is not going to have a very nice end.

 

[ko888]

Internet Explorer 11 is in the Windows Accessories folder requiring you to manually navigate to the app.

You will also need to change some Security Settings in IE11 to enable support for ActiveX controls.

 

[Eximo]

Some of the older controls simply don't work though. We had to go to many a vendor and hammer into them that Active X was going away. Luckily most were large companies and had HTML5 versions in the works, but many took far too long and we had to do silly things like VMs for IE6 and IE8 compatibility.

 

[Eximo]

And if this is a private endeavor you can package older IE versions as independent programs running in a sandbox. Microsoft frowns on this though, so we never secured permission to do so.

 

[Tyler Yaccarino]

Thank you all for the replies. I will try a fresh install of Windows 10, then go through the necessary steps to attempt to get these ActiveX controls going.

If that doesn't work, I might try installing Windows 7.

 

[Eximo]

If you update Windows 7 it will install the same version of IE11. You could turn off automatic updates to prevent that.