My company is finally rolling out the critical, and increasingly inescapable Micro$oft Security Patch MS06-021.  This cumulative patch includes lawsuit-required code to break (or at least bend) ActiveX controls.  Rather than the controls executing automatically in IE upon page load, you'll get little prompts to click on them.

Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control

Developers have a way to bypass the prompt, but many of them haven't done it yet (since M$ has gone back and forth on whether it's needed), and, of course, various sites and systems may not have incorporated  said patches. 

(Those of us who run Firefox don't have the problem because we don't run ActiveX, which is both more secure and occasionally annoying for accessing those sites that require it.)

So if you see this yourself, or get calls to your helpdesk about it -- that's the scoop.

Filed under :: Hi-Tech