ActiveX

My brother in law is having great difficulty with his PC. He is running Windows 2000. The following problems just started this week. When attempting to open My documents, Control Panel, Recycle bin, Windows Explorer the following error comes up. Header is Microsoft Internet Explorer and the error says " Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page. As a result, the page may not display correctly. When attempting to open my computer the same error message appears and after you click ok, no icons appear but on the status bar it says 5 objects. I installed the free version of AVG and it found a couple of viruses which it put into quarantine, I deleted them and rebooted the PC. Now the screensaver is acting up and running very slowly. Any ideas? Thanks

PC can access the internet without receiving error message.

 

Try getting to a start=>run line then

Code:

sfc /scannow

and see if the system file checker finds and replaces any damaged or missing system file that may be causing the problem.

 

I have also been working on a machine with the exact problem. Some background on the problem: He first noticed it whenever he tried to run anything in the Norton suite. He got the ActiveX error every time he tried. He followed the instructions on the Symantec site to try to correct the problem. The last step was to uninstall/reinstall the suite, which he did. What he didn't notice was that since he was unable to run the Norton configuration after reinstalling, the firewall was always disabled on startup. This was all around the weekend of the 5th.

I just finished cleaning up his machine from a ton of spyware/adware/viruses but he wasn't sure if he was having problems with any of this before he starting getting the errors or not. So I don't know if this problem was caused by any of the garbage he picked up or if it is something else. I have run Spybot, Ad-ware, and M/S AntiSpyware and everything is now clean. I ran virus scans at Housecall and RAV and cleaned everything they found. The PC is running good except for this error.

Newt, I followed your suggestion and ran 'sfc' but it had no affect. One thing I did notice was that this problem does not occur in Safe Mode. I rebooted and looked at all the services that were started and all processes that were running and I didn't see any that were unusual.

Hope all this will help someone figure out the cause/solution cause I am out of ideas.

Thanks

 

bgreene431: Sounds to me like a spyware/virus issue. Run lavasoft in safe mode and let it clean anything it finds. Also maybe try CWSShredder and with most of the new spyware im seeing needs to be removed manually with hijackthis. Also check for viruses. Try http://www.pcpitstop.com/testax.asp in IE to make sure Active X actually is working properly. Also like newt reccomended see if sfc replaces any files.

compdude: You may also want to try that link to test out ActiveX and also run hijackthis so you can actually be sure all files are cleaned. Disable nortons script protection service or just turn it off under options, reinstall windows scripting 5.6 and make sure you settings for the local intranet are right.

Also both of you might want to check event viewer and see if there is anything that sheds more light on a specific error.

 

evidence,

Thanks for you response. Since this is a friend's PC, I'll have to wait until I can get to it to actually try the PC Pitstop ActiveX test. As for disabling Nortons, the only thing I can do is kill it all together since I get the error message whenever I try to start any part of the Norton Suite. I did run Hijack This and cleaned everything that was bad and I have verified the Local Intranet settings.

I will try reinstalling windows scripting (not sure how to do that but I'll figure it out) and see if the event log has anything useful.

 

Norton actually has a service that can be stopped, I believe it's called Symantec Script Blocker, I've seen this with 2004/2005 atleast. Also if you just try typing windows scripting 5.6 into google the top hit should be a link to the file.

Did you uninstall and reinstall norton after you got everything cleaned up? Maybe also try that after this time around.

 

Yes, I did uninstall/reinstall Nortons after everything was cleaned. However, I don't think the problem is with Norton since it affects other O/S things (explorer, Control Panel, My Computer, etc.) as well. Norton is just impacted by whatever the problem is since it uses ActiveX to display its pages. Even with Norton uninstalled, the problem still exists. Plus, regardless of the status of Norton, everything works fine in Safe Mode.

 

Ironically enough I came across a PC similar to both of your problems recently after a run of cleaning out a nasty rootkit (first time i had come across one in the wild). We were on the right track, but unfortunately the local intranet and my computer are two different zones, and as far as i can tell the only way to change the settings for the my computer zone are via registry. If you hit these two keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0

and change the value 1200 to 0 (mine was 3) it will allow activex to run in the my computer zone. Im pretty sure this is the area thats edited when you change your security setting from IE in your local intranet, internet, trusted and untrusted sites (there is Zone 1-4 under this same key). Hope that helps

Jason

 

evidence,

Thanks for your reply. I apologize for taking so long to respond back to this thread, but since this is a friends PC, I haven't had a change to work on it. After doing more research, I came across the same solution as you found. I'm glad to hear you used it and were able to fix the problem. Just for future reference for anyone else that has this problem, here are a couple sites I found that address this issue:

WinXPTutor's XP Resources
Computing.Net

Thanks for your help!