ActiveX in Outlook

[Minty]

I have created Signatures on all the PCs here at work, I went into "Advanced Edit" and put in the signature that is required.

Now some of the signatures are creating ActiveX problems, others aren't.

We are using Office 2003 and it makes me think that Word2003 is the problem here as it loads Word to do the Advanced Edit.

Can anytone tell me how to get rid of the ActiveX crap?

Thank you

[Intrepid00]

You must have put some activeX in the signatures and by default Outlook puts security on Highest and I would leave it there.

What exactly did you put in the signatures.

[Minty]

Don't know if you've come across it, it is basically that thing from hotbar.com, people have had that in the past.
I have uninstalled it but it seems its still lurking there for some reason.

I ideally need to take that off though, my PC is on "Highest" and it doesn't give ActiveX errors

[Minty]

I sorted it, it appeared to be that Microsoft Word was not the Email Editor in this case, so I merely set it to choose Word as a Email Editor

[Vodka]

Get out your spyware-removal program. Hotbar is among the most common, and also on eof the worst, pieces of spyware on the internet. Much like Gator or Comet Cursor, or Xupiter, you can often get this from drive-by downloads. It tracks everything about you - credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mails, names, web usage, sites visited, etc, etc, etc, and then sends this information off to hotbar HQ. Hotbar then SELLS YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION to other companies, who use this information to give you all kinds of spam, and sometimes even worse things.

I highly suggest getting pestpatrol, spybot search and destroy, and ad-aware. Those are in the order of best to worst.

For more info, check out the pestpatrol reports on it

[Minty]

Thank you for your help

I managed to fix the ActiveX problem, however the information you provided is handy.

I ran ad-ware a while ago on all machines after I unistalled hotbar and it cleared off everything (so it appeared).

Thanks

Minty,

The problem is caused by Word in Office 2003. By default, it is enabled to 'embed smart tags' into documents.

When you open ADVANCED EDIT in the signature editor, it opens Word as the editor. Then when you save the file you made in Word, it embeds 'Smart tags' into the document.

To correct this, click on Advanced Edit, then when Word opens, go to Tools > Options and then the SAVE tab. Then uncheck the box that says 'Embed Smart Tags". This shoiuld fix the problem.

I researched this for ages and didn't find anything on the Internet. So I checked the email header and source code and found 'smart tag' inside it. Then some general snooping around in Word, I came across that checkbox.

[Minty]

Thank you for your help

I am really grateful.

I actually managed to fix the problem by going to Tools > Options > Mail Format and selecting "Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail messages"

I will bare your post in mind for any future problems though