I have an Athlon 600 Mhz, 64mb RAM, 15gig hard drive, and running Windows 98SE using Internet Explorer 5.5. When using Outlook Express (and also other applications) sometimes we get a warning message comes up saying ‘An ActiveX control on this page is not safe. Your current security settings prohibit running unsafe controls on this page. As a result this page may not display as intended’. Furthermore, sometimes it performs ‘an illegal operation and the current application will be shut down’. Can you explain what ActiveX does and how I can remedy this?

Simply put, ‘ActiveX’ is Microsoft’s equivalent to Sun Microsystems ‘Java’. An ActiveX control is a self-sufficient program which can run in an ActiveX environment (eg. Internet Explorer). The problem you are experiencing could have a few sources. Firstly, if you are running CyberMedia FirstAid 98 there is a known conflict between FirstAid 98 and Internet Explorer which could cause the problem. Secondly, the problem could occur should you have your security settings in Internet Explorer set too high. For instructions on resolving both of the above, please visit the following article in Microsoft Knowledge Base: support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q182/7/44.asp . This article also explains another method of possibly resolving the conflict by checking whether you have the correct version of the MSJAVA.DLL file. However, I won’t go into detail about that here. The problem can also occur if you have downloaded the security patch from Microsoft that prevents your computer from becoming infected with the KAK worm. The problem can occur when you have installed the patch but you still have an infected message in Outlook Express. Have a look through all of your email folders in Outlook Express for any suspicious emails which may contain the virus. I can’t say for sure how to recognise if an email has got the virus as I have not seen an infected email. However, probably the best way to go about it is to click on a message and press CTRL-F3. This will bring up the message source. Scroll through the source and look for ‘kak’. If you do find a reference to ‘kak’, I suggest you delete that message. Follow this procedure for each message. Although it may be tedious, this is probably the only way of finding the culprit email.