Prerequisite for Win 10 using vb6 activex documents or webbrowser control

Question

I am trying to install a legacy VB6 app on a Windows 10 Enterprise PC. The app has an install program and it is installed on many Windows server 2016 machines. This program uses active user documents (dob files) that load in a webbrowser control. The install is successful but when I run the program instead of loading the user document in the webbrowser control i get a dialog box asking me if I want to download or save a 'vbd' file with the same name as the active x dll the user document creates.

My question is if anyone knows if there is a prerequisite to having the vb6 webbrowser control or active x documents work on a Windows 10 machine? I have the dll registered and the registry entries match the Windows 2016 server.

Thanks in advance, Hank

Answer 1

Here's the relevant (I think) part of the VB6 help for ActiveX Documents:

A few of the more common problems in Internet Component Download and their solutions are listed in this section. These include: [...] Prompt: "Opening file DocumentName.VBD. What would you like to do with this file? Open it or save it to disk?

The proposed solution to this is

This error occurs when the Visual Basic runtime library (MSVBVM60.DLL) is not installed. Generally, this occurs when the safety level in Internet Explorer is set to High. To correct this, you must set the safety level in Internet Explorer to Medium or None.

Note sure when this help entry was written, but with the latest IEs, you add the site in question to the Intranet zone and change the setting there. If that actually resolves the problem, you then should try turning security up again by going into "Customized" and add restrictions again that don't cause it to break again.