Once again today I stumbled on a website built on MOSS where the designer of the site haven’t thought of Name ActiveX Control. The control loads on the visitors computer to access information from the installed IM about current online status. In Internet Explorer the site must be on the trusted sites list, otherwise the famous golden bar appear. For most public sites this IM status information isn’t needed anyways. And I cannot seem to get over the fact that so many ignores this.

So this is my “save-the-world-from-name-activex” blog post =)

The reason that so many sites forgetts to remove this is that the author proably doesn’t know it loads. This component loads silently when your on the intranet, because the Internet Explorer looks at the url and and determines that it’s a trusted site, ie executing the activex without further questions. However when accessing the site via internet, and the site is not a trusted site..

Well the solution is known and have been around as long as IE almost. The solution is documented here, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;931509. The recomended solution is number 3. If you don’t like flying around to all IE owners in the world =). What this solution do is essentaly commenting out ProcessImn() and the actual call to the dll never occurs and.. no golden bar!