What is ActiveX, is it good or bad?

Any way to detect the local files an ActiveX object is accessing?

• A website I'm using uses an ActiveX control to check for unique visitors. For some reason, the site believes me to have visited before (I haven't) and will not give me the first-time-visitor benefits I am after. I have tried deleting the ActiveX object, clearing all cookies, even changing my IP, but nothing works. I am assuming that if must be checking for the existance of some dummy file it places on hard drives on the first visit. Somehow, I seem to have this dummy file (maybe because the guy who coded the ActiveX object got lazy and put the samme dummycheck in the control for some other site I also visited). Is there any monitoring software out there that can keep an eye on what the ActiveX controls are doing?

• Answer:

  You can search in the windows search box by "last accessed". If you know the time and date the activex control was running, you can look through all files accessed at exactly that time for something suspicious. Good luck! (However, the ActiveX control could simply be reading your installation ID, in which case all you can do is use a different computer)