Active X and latest update from Microsoft - Dec 2014

[mguilbert]

Good Day All,
Earlier this week you may have had a Microsoft update/fix that affected your active X controls. Here is the solution we found.

Attached you will find a batch file made to fix the ActiveX problem. A user must shut down all MS Office applications then run the batch file and it will delete the 2 bad exd files. As far as I can tell Microsoft has still not sent out a fix.


Needless to say the batch file is very fast since it is just deleting 2 files.

Del %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\VBE\MSForms.exd
Del %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\Excel8.0\MSForms.exd

Gotta Love little Billy boy and his marry band of misfits.

Hope this helps,

 

[dgriffith]

As this appears to be posted by an expert, for experts, perhaps you would be so kind as to expertly answer a few simple(ton's) questions:

How does this affect regular folk?
Should we apply this fix anyway?
What does this 'fix' fix?
How can we tell if what we have is broken?
What if I didn't notice the update, let alone what the update broke?
What's Active X? When I use Excel, I don't see an Active X option anywhere.
And most importantly, How do we know this isn't a trap?

My tongue-in-cheek questions are actually serious--I use Excel quite a bit at work and would hate to get screwed up because I didn't know what Billy boy did to me, even though he's retired.

 

[Marc]

I'm a Mac person, but I did take a look around and didn't really see anything other than this: Microsoft withdraws bad Windows 7 update that broke future Windows 7 updates - https://arstechnica.com/information...7-update-that-broke-future-windows-7-updates/

Nothing I read has to do with Active X problems, but not being a Windows person I don't follow it all that much.

I had to look up what Active X does (is)...

ActiveX

(broken link removed)

 

[pkost]

Apparently a recent MS update caused a fault which prevents ActiveX controls working in excel worksheets.

It boils down to...if you don't understand what I said above, you don't really need to worry!

If you do understand, or just like things to work even when you never use them, then the following link is the official advise from MS

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3025036/EN-US

Although I've looked at the batch file attached above and can't see a problem, I would always caution against running one when you don't know what it is!

 

[mguilbert]

Thanks pkost. I noticed MS issued the resolutions after we found our fix. I agree. I would not follow fixes unless I knew who they weer from. I have removed our attached fix and will let others just follow the link to the MS site.