My sister asked to help her laptop this past weekend.  Its was a goofy little error and I didn’t want to forget about it in case I came across it again.

She had an issue where every time she opened Yahoo! Messenger on her fairly new Vista laptop, she would get an error stating the following:

This program requires flash.ocx, which is no longer included in this version of Windows.

If you click the “Cancel” button, the error goes away and Yahoo! Messenger runs fine for that session.  She had already reinstalled both Yahoo and Flash to their latest versions and neither stopped the error from popping up.

Well, OCX is the file extension for ActiveX controllers under Internet Explorer.  Since these are potentially very dangerous pieces of code, they aren’t installed automatically like in previous versions of Windows.  Between Vista’s User Access Control and IE 7, you must approve the action before installing an ActiveX plugin.

Appearantly Yahoo! Messenger has its hooks into IE in some way, most likely to display Flash based advertisements.  When initially setting up my sisters laptop I made Firefox the default browser, so the plugin wasn’t asked to be installed.  To get rid of the error for good, reinstall Flash from Adobe’s website using IE.  By allowing the ActiveX plugin to be installed it will create a flash.ocx file (possibly flash9.ocx, flash10.ocx, etc. depending on the version of flash being installed.) This corrected the matter immediately.

In my research I did find that this doesn’t always work for similair issues.  It was often suggested that you should make a copy of flash(insert_version_number).ocx to just flash.ocx.  For instance if you are using Flash version 10, then do a search for the file flash10.ocx, copy it, and place the copy in the same folder with the filename flash.ocx.

I can’t vouch for how secure this is from a system security standpoint.  ActiveX controllers are risky things and should be avoided whenever possible.  In this case I’m placing a bit of trust with Adobe.  I’m figuring that a such a widely distributed plugin would be repaired rather quickly if a devastating vulnerabilty, lest Adobe suffered serious embarassment. (Naive of me, I know.)