I have been playing around with the latest Windows Vista builds and I have written an article on the ActiveX Installer Service but I am not able to complete the article because apparently it doesn't work yet. My guess is that the problem lies within Internet Explorer as it needs some adjustments to work correctly with the ActiveX Installer Service. I really hope that this feature makes RC1 but chances are odd.
What is the ActiveX Installer Service in a nutshell? Everytime Internet Explorer needs to download an add-on it will verify using the ActiveX Installer Service against the group policy settings for the ActiveX Installer Service administrative template whether or not it is allowed to download and install the ActiveX control based on the URL specified in the attribute CODEBASE of the OBJECT tag. If it is allowed IE will run an instance of the Internet Explorer ActiveX Installer. If there are nog group policy settings specified for that URL the default UAC behaviour kicks in mean that the standard user needs to provide the login credentials of a user with administrative privileges.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado