Can you install an ActiveX control in IE without administrator privileges?

Question

I am working on a web application that requires an ActiveX control. It installs very well when the user has administrator rights, but otherwise does not load. Is it by design, and if so, is it documented somewhere? (preferably MSDN)

Answer 1

Actually, none of these answers is completely correct; if you install an ActiveX control for each user, it will work fine, without administrative privileges, regardless of the group the user is in. Basically, this is due to setting it to HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Depending on which your activex control is written on this, it can be easy or it can be difficult to change; with ATL 9 it's pretty easy since you just need to call the function:

AtlSetPerUserRegistration(perUser); 

FireBreath does this by default, so admin privileges do not have to install a plugin / control; it also has a workaround for older versions of ATL (ATL 9 - VS 2008). This is all C ++, so if your control is written in something else, I don’t know how to fix it, but it should at least start with you.

Answer 2

Difficult answer: Yes. The user account must be part of a group that grants the privilege of registering libraries (dll) or controls (ocx) or must be directly assigned privelege.

The simple answer is no. Only accounts with an administrative application for installing OCX or DLLs can install Active-X controls (by default, these accounts are part of administrators, domain administrators, or user groups).

Edit: I think this question has been changed ... Yes, this is by design.

Answer 3

You can use Vista with IE8.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd433049%28VS.85%29.aspx