Error: -145

[Guitar Maestro]

I restarted one of our computers one day and all of a sudden got an error message when I tried to run one of our applications.  The application, I believe was written in LabWindows 7.1 a long time ago (before I came to this company), and no one else knows anything about it.  The error says "Activex control not registered on this computer".  What do I do???

[menchar]

Sounds like the application is trying to reference an ActiveX (previously known as COM - Component Object Model or OLE - Object Linking and Embedding - originally DDE - Dynamic Data Exchange) object that's not on the system.

ActiveX is binary reusablity in Windows - these binary objects are separately installed (or not) on the system and registered.  Once installed and registered, the ActiveX component is available for use by applications.  Your application may be designed to use some particular ActiveX component that's separately configured / installed and it doesn't happen to be on that particular PC.

You can use the XP management console (Component Services) to see what you have on a particular system in the way of ActiveX components.  They also have an .ocx file extension so you can find them that way as well.

The Windows SDK has info on ActiveX.

Menchar

[Guitar Maestro]

The main thing that I don't understand is that this application worked for years before this particular day that I restarted the computer, and then suddenly the error appeared.  The application (I believe) was created in LabWindows and runs on WINNT.  The computer is old (350MHz) and very sluggish (I've attempted to defrag but no defrag utility is on the computer and update the RAM but to no avail), so is it possible there was a hard drive error that fouled this ocx or dll or whatever it is that the application is searching for?  I will scan the computer for all .ocx files and see what comes up

Thanks again and in advance for all the replies that I get

[Guitar Maestro]

The .ocx suggestion worked!  I ran regsvr32 and re-registered the only activex file in the directory concerned and the application opened normally.  Thanks a million for the suggestion, I never really thought about registering .ocx files, just .dlls...