I'm surprised to learn that ActiveX is such an unsuccessful technology. After all, right here on my machine are RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Flash, Shockwave, and several other popular ActiveX components, and those are just the ones I downloaded.

I believe (although I'm not sure) that those you mention are simply Netscape plugins wrappered in ActiveX controls.

I could be wrong of course. But when I installed IE6 (which doesn't do Netscape-style plugins at all, only ActiveX ones) a load of stuff stopped working.