ActiveX woes

[Arpanet]

My wacky PC just started doing this a second ago... for some reason completely unbeknownst to me, whenever I open a folder, I get this message:

"An ActiveX control on this page might be unsafe to interact with other parts of the page. Do you want to allow this interaction? Yes/No"

Clicking either one sends me to the folder with no noticeable difference.

What the heck is ActiveX, and what it's doing to my PC, and how can I make it stop?

[CDBuRnOuT]

MS ****.

It's what they want to push developers to instead of plugins for IE, hence IE 5.5 SP2 and later lack plugin support..

[Arpanet]

Lousy Microsoft... so how do I stop this error message? It's getting really annoying really fast... I've tried messing with Active Desktop, nothing there. I disabled everything ActiveX-related option in Internet Options > Security, nothing there either. What gives? Should I just reinstall Win98?