Internet Explorer begins blocking out-of-date ActiveX controls

ActiveX controls are small apps that let Web sites provide content, like videos and games, and let you interact with content like toolbars. Unfortunately, because many ActiveX controls aren’t automatically updated, they can become outdated as new versions are released.

What does the out-of-date ActiveX control blocking notification look like?

It is important to note that, by default, this feature warns users, with options to update the control or override the warning. When Internet Explorer blocks an outdated ActiveX control, you will see a notification bar similar to this, depending on your version of Internet Explorer:

 

Can this be disabled?

Yes, there are several ways to disable this feature. Microsoft provides updated IE group policy administrative templates which include 4 new group policies to control this feature*. Two of these group policies can be used to disable this feature on a per domain basis or entirely.

If you do not wish to use the group policy administrative templates to disable the feature, you can use the following registry keys that can be set via group policy (the process is described in more detail here and here). All keys can be set in HKLM or HKCU (HKLM will take preference over HKCU).

Policy	Registry setting
Turn off blocking of outdated ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer on specific domains	reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Ext\ Domain" /v contoso.com /t REG_SZ /f
Turn off blocking of outdated ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer	reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Ext" /v VersionCheckEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

And what if I don't have Administrator rights?

This can be done by deleting any previously downloaded versionlist.xml files and instructing IE to stop updating the XML file. This can be done by running the following commands in a command window:

1. reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\VersionManager" /v DownloadVersionList /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
2. del “%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\VersionManager\versionlist.xml”

Based on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/06/internet-explorer-begins-blocking-out-of-date-activex-controls.aspx