ActiveX control initialization warning appearing out of the blue

[iswehr]

Hi Everyone. I have an Excel application that we've developed and used over the past 3 years that contains ActiveX controls (all official Microsoft ones, such as mscomctl). Out of the blue late last week (i.e., after having used this for a number of years with no issue, including earlier last week), I started getting the following warning message the first time controls get triggered (e.g. when a userform is opened, etc.) upon opening the file:

"This application is about to initialize ActiveX controls that might be unsafe. If you trust the source of this file, select OK and the controls will be initialized using your current workspace settings."

This appears to be happening on all other computers at my office (Excel 2013 32bit, Win 7 64bit), but doesn't happen on my home computer (Excel 2010) and my clients aren't seeing this either (various Excel versions). It is affecting old versions of the application that haven't been edited or saved in years, as well as current versions. Clicking 'cancel' to the warning message doesn't seem to negatively impact functionality at all, other than that in the case of a Treeview control, the size gets shrunk down to the minimum (but all the content is there and functional if you use the scroll bars to move around in the tiny space).

I have seen past threads in this forum, on the Microsoft support site, etc., talk about needing to solve this by changing Unsafe For Initialization (UFI) settings in the registry, but I can't accept that this is the only solution seeing as this only started happening last week with no obvious trigger. Does anyone have any theories on what might have changed between now and a week ago to cause this / what I can do about it? Thanks.

[Winon]

Hello iswehr,

This is a problem with Activex controls in Excel since who knows when!

Start searching for a solution here:

https://www.google.co.za/webhp?sourc...topped+working

Regards.

[iswehr]

Thanks Winon for the suggestion. My issue isn't that the controls aren't working; rather, the computers at my office have all-of-a-sudden decided that they are suspicious. I tried googling and searching this forum before I posted, but didn't find anything that addressed my issue, but hoping that others might have a specific idea. Any other thoughts?

[JosephP]

I guess an update has been applied to your computers recently

[Qikslime]

This is happening in our workplace as well. Anyone have any further thoughts on this. It started around the same time as it did for the original poster?

[iswehr]

Unfortunately I wasn't able to do any better than the response that JosephP provided. An Office update seems to be the best guess for the general cause, but as to what specifically caused it (or which specific update), I have no idea. In the end, I figured that even if I was successful in identifying the specific update, Microsoft wouldn't care much anyways!

The Band-Aid solution to the issue can be found in this posting from years ago: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-q...x-warning.html

Just scroll down to the registry edit instructions. It worked on my computer, but does come with the downside of treating all controls as safe. Of course, this would have to be rolled out to all affected computers ... I'm just thankful that none of my clients have had this happen to them!