Ok, nothing as severe as last time when I got infested by spyware. In fact, the problem I've had for the last few days was related to exactly the opposite - too much security.

I've been screwing with my security settings in IE because I have been testing Help Builder's HTML editing and Word embedding features and wanted to duplicate some failures customers where seeing when the permissions were too low. Never mind - I wasn't able to dupe this environment.

Anyway, somewhere in there I went and set Local IntraNet zone to High security and Set Default. This of course locks down IE pretty severely to the point where everything becomes a 'clickmare'. Every page that uses script or any sort of component, including SWF flash 'images' pops up the ActiveX dialog.

Fine I knew that would happen, and after I was done testing I went back and reset the setting to Medium with a few custom overrides. And the problems continued. I then figured the Internet Zone and sure enough I had to override that as well.

Still the errors showed up especially on the Universal Thread and Microsoft Knowledgebase sites. What I forgot was the Trusted Site zone. Sure enough many days later when I looked more closely at the IE security settings, the Trusted Site Zone did not allow for running ActiveX controls without prompting.

Now, I know I never touched Trusted Sites. In fact, looking at the security setting, Trusted Sites is set to Low security as the 'master setting'. Yet for some odd reason the Run ActiveX controls option was disabled. How the heck did this get set?

There are so many ways through this frigging security dialogs it's a real drag to figure out any problems with security. It's no wonder that many throw up their hands and eventually just set all the settings to low and hope for the best...

Aarrgh... I hope I'll remember this next time. This isn't the first time this has happened.