Danielle Hubbard, a 34-year-old banker from Gary, Indiana, doesn’t know the first thing about ActiveX controls, so when she gets an ActiveX error while browsing the Internet, she simply doesn’t know what to do. “The most typical message that pops up is: ‘An Active control on this page might be unsafe to interact with other parts of the page. Do you want to allow this interaction?’” says Danielle. “I sort of uncertainly click on Yes and carry on,” she adds sheepishly.

Most amateur Internet users would be able to identify with this situation, because, in the ordinary course of things, they don’t even need to know about ActiveX controls or ActiveX errors. Heck, they simply don’t need to know about ActiveX, period. Under these circumstances, such users must pardon us for throwing IT jargon at them, but we’ll try and keep this as simple as we can.

So here goes: ActiveX is a Microsoft technology used to develop reusable object oriented software components. Actually, ActiveX is another name for OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) automation, which is not a separate technology. But while ‘automation’ refers to the overall process, ActiveX refers to the objects that can be created using automation.

With us thus far? Good, because we will continue in this vein for a little longer. Now you know what ActiveX is, you also need to know that an ActiveX control is a special ActiveX object designed to be used like a plug-in. The most common use of ActiveX controls is to build plug-ins for Internet Explorer.

When it comes to ActiveX errors, says software analyst Frederick McGill of New York, “Most people will be familiar with Error 429: ActiveX component can’t create object.” The problem here is that according to Microsoft, there is no single cause behind an error 429. The best that we can say is that an ActiveX error happens either because of an error in the application or system configuration, or because of a missing or damaged component, which shows up in Windows Registry and clutters your OS.

As Frederick explains, “An ActiveX control is like a Java applet, but unlike Java applets, ActiveX controls have full access to Windows OS, which in turn gives them the ability to damage software or important data on a machine.” Microsoft recognized this risk and developed a registration system so that browsers could authenticate an ActiveX control before downloading it (and you have to download ActiveX controls to run certain applications). The problem is compounded because, unlike Java applets, which can be written to run on all platforms, ActiveX controls only run in MS Windows environments, and are written in MFC, ATL, C++ and Visual Basic.

While you can choose to manually get rid of ActiveX errors, the best way to do so, we would suggest, is by cleaning up Windows Registry so that you can get rid of aforementioned ‘missing or damaged components’. Since Windows uses ActiveX controls to display such activity as animation, video images, 3D virtual reality and high-resolution images, etc., there’s no working around ActiveX downloads, but if you clean up your Windows Registry periodically, you will be able to ensure that your OS is not cluttered with useless components that throw up those irritating ActiveX error messages.

We recommend RegCure (direct download link) as the premiere registry cleaner and ActiveX repair tool.