ActiveX Control closes IE with an error when installed

[brokenhalo]

Hello again guys,

I have a client with 5 computers in their office. They have a mortgage/title company and they need to access a particular website. This website requires the installation of a BHO ActiveX control. The website works fine and the BHO works fine on four of the computers, but when I installed the BHO on the last computer, IE gives an error and shuts down. I have tried removing the BHO from "C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files" (XP Pro SP3 Machine by the way) and then going to the website and re-installing but that doesn't seem to make any difference. Any help would be greatly appreciated, my customer is pissed. Thanks

Brad L. - MCP

"If the doctors told me I had 5 minutes to live, I would type faster.

 

[smah]

Are they all the same version of IE? I'd be inclined to suspect a conflict with some other BHO already installed. Are there any obvious differences from the working systems - toolbars, security software, etc?

 

[brokenhalo]

They are using the same vcersion of IE. 2 of the other computers are still using win 2k pro, and another 2 are using xp, all work fine. The computer in question (the one not working) had IE6 and wasn't working, so I upgraded to IE7 to no avail. I then restored IE back to factory, just in case there was some sort of conflict or setting preventing it from running right. Any more suggestions are greatly appreciated. I'm starting to doubt my own abilities which doesn't happen often

Brad L. - MCP

"If the doctors told me I had 5 minutes to live, I would type faster.

 

[brokenhalo]

*UPDATE*

...Also, I tried installing Firefox and Opera, neither of which worked at all. They didn't even seem to recognize that an ActiveX control was even required to view the page.

Brad L. - MCP

"If the doctors told me I had 5 minutes to live, I would type faster.

 

[smah]

ActiveX is a Micorsoft technology that will only work with IE (I've heard that there's a FF plugin, but it's not 100% reliable).

I'm still leaning toward something else causing the problem (third party firewall, antivirus, antispyware or something else that's preventing changes to IE settings, etc, etc). What else is different from these machines? Does the user have administrative priveledges is a proxy or filtering service being used (I wouldn't expect either of these to crash IE however). I'm not sure how IE handles ActiveX controls when running in safe mode (you can test with one of the known working machines), but do you get any different results by running the machine in Safe Mode with Networking? System File Checker certainly won't hurt anything - from a command prompt sfc /scannnow. Also, if you're back to using IE6, you could try the IEFix utility. The only other thing that I can think of is that sometimes, the initialization of the ActiveX control might be done by javascript - you could use a site like this to check that javascript is working correctly on that machine.

 

[brokenhalo]

I will try all of these things and post back with the results. I didn't have all day to be playing with it until I had a lead of some sort. I didn't revert back to IE6, and I have heard of that IEFix utility, so I will try that as well.

Brad L. - MCP

"If the doctors told me I had 5 minutes to live, I would type faster.