| --- OR --- |
| This Should Not Be So Complicated |
If you wondering why this is such a bug-a-boo for me, see Sharepoint and the name.dll
So let's say you accidently clicked on the yellow bar that warns you about an ActiveX control on an IE webpage
further suppose after you did that instead of clicking off, you accidently clicked “allow for all sites” well that should be easy to undo… Right?
Wrong!
Because it isn’t easy. I have an idea, let’s open that IE dialog that shows us all ActiveX Controls that have been authorized in IE and on which domains. What? You say there is no such place? Your right, and that is so wrong in so many ways. Its just not possible that someone might accidently grant permission to something, and then want to undo that mistake, so there is no need to offer a way to undo it, right? So where is that information located you ask, well in the registry of course. So we should just need to look it up, oh my aching back, if only it were that easy!
What does the information bar say if you click the help and look in the ActiveX Add-In faq (and I quote in totality)?
So what do you do if you can’t see / remove it from the Add-on Manager and also can’t remove it thru the Control Panel, noticing they say “… you might be able to uninstall it through Control Panel”? well you are just out of luck. Again, that is so wrong in so many ways. As you can tell I’m not happy about the state of affairs as it pertains to this issue.
So let’s say you have done that by accident, how do you undo it?
Option One: buy a 3rd party spam/adware/registry cleaner (most effective, but it will probably be a sledgehammer approach to kill a gnat)
Option Two: manually try to remove it, here are the steps I had to go thru when I accidently installed the control you see above in the first figure.
- Search Google using the description of the control presented in the yellow information bar
- If you don’t remember what it was called, find another computer that hasn’t been to the website that used the control
- Surf to the same page
- DON’T install it, mark down name, and close the browser
- Try to determine the physical file name of the control
- Search your file system to locate the file (use advanced search and remember to search hidden and system files)
- If you can’t determine the name of the file, see Option One above, you are SOL.
- open regedit and search from the top node (thru all items) for the path/name of the file
- Once you find the key, note down the GUID associated with that file
- Now locate that Guid in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\<TheNotedGuid>\
- Now look to see if it has an iexplore key, and if under that it has an AllowedDomains
- delete the AllowedDomains key
- Then click on the iexplore key and see if there is a Blocked value, if so delete it
- There you have cleared it out and may proceed on your way.
Gee, wasn’t that easy?
