How To Solutions

Outlook ActiveX Object Error from Signature

Posted on the December 18th, 2008 under MS Office by admin

Ever created a new signature file in Microsoft Outlook and when you go to send a new message an ActiveX control box appears telling you of an error? Here’s a quick fix that will stop the error from appearing but let you keep your fancy signature.

The Error Message

One or more ActiveX controls could not be displayed because either:

1) Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page, or

2) You have blocked a publisher of one of the controls.

As a result, the page may not display correctly.

The Fix

Firstly, let’s locate your signature folder. Copy one of the following lines (starting at the first %) depending on what your operating system is.

• Vista: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures
• XP-2003: %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

Click on Start and then Run – paste the line you copied into the Run box and hit Enter.

You should see 3 files created for your signature file (in .htm, .txt and .rtf formats). If you can’t see the file extensions, go to Tools / Folder Options / View and untick ‘Hide extensions for known file types’, or right-click the file and select ‘Properties’ to determine the file type.

Open the .htm signature file in Notepad or any other text editor. Then go to Edit > Find and type in “object”. You should see that the text editor has highlighted a bit of the signature code. Look for the bit that looks something like this:

<OBJECT id=ieooui classid=clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D></OBJECT>.

Simply remove that whole bit – everything from <OBJECT to /OBJECT>. Save the file and to make sure the ActiveX object doesn’t come back I recommend making the file read only – do this by right clicking the file, going to Properties and making ‘Read-only’ checked.

Go back to Outlook and when you go to send a new message, no more annoying ActiveX object warning.