Vista 64 - ie7 security confusions

Hi,

I have loaded Vista 64 to see if it is liveable. One of the first problems I

have come across is trying to run ActiveX components.

1 - I am prompted to install the ActiveX then verify that I want to install

it, but then the info bar says "Your security settings do not allow websites

to use ActiveX controls installed on your computer".

So why am I allowed to install them in the first place if I can't run them????

I have tried every settign I can find and have got nowhere. I have tried

adding the site to the trusted zone - still no joy.

A good for instance is anything from the http://www.microsoft.com/download that

wants to do genuine windows verification - I can't! Very secure, but very

unhelpful.

I finally managed to succeed by using the 32bit verison of IE7, running as

administrator, with default security settings. Surely there must be a better

way? The point of non-administrator mode is to increase security, but so far

this is unusable. What is the recommended way of handling this?

2 - Protected mode. Nothing I seem to do shows "Protected Mode: On" in the

staus bar. It is always showing "Off" irrespective of whether I have enabled

it or not in security settings. If I actually disabel enough zones the info

bar tells me, but when I turn them all back on and restart IE (either 32 or

64 bit) the status bar STILL says it is off. Am I missing something?

Other than that I am quite happy so far, I have had very few things

complain. I even have hardware DEP turned on for everything and no problems

so far - but then I'm only about 2 days into setting up my system

Any thoughts welcomed,