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by Paul Silverman

Microsoft Internet Explorer gives you a great deal of help when it comes to automatically downloading and installing ActiveX controls. Click on Yes when IE prompts you to install a detected control, and the browser does the rest. However, IE isn't quite as helpful when it comes to finding and managing all the controls you've installed on your system. If you're a big ActiveX fan, pruning unnecessary files and managing necessary ones could quickly become a daunting task. That's where WinMag's exclusive Active XCavator can help.

Click to enlarge. Take Control of ActiveX. Active XCavator works as a housekeeper for your ActiveX controls. You can delete unneeded controls with one mouse click and restore them must as easily.

This simple, compact utility (its single EXE file is only 47KB) lists all the ActiveX controls installed by IE 3.0 or later. By default, IE stores all related files in your C:\WINDOWS\OCCACHE directory, but a quick look at the OCX files tells you almost nothing about the controls you're running. Active XCavator digs through the data for you and displays a convenient palette of information for each file. You can quickly reference each control's full name, author, file size, version number, installation date and other stored information, such as author comments or details on special builds of the file.

If you discover you're housing unneeded or outdated controls that just chew up valuable disk space, XCavator lets you delete them with a mouse click. If you delete one by mistake, simply return to the original source site, and the control will be reinstalled automatically.

Download Active XCavator 1.0 free from the WinMag Web site.

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