Bob, the recent patches that Billy's Boys have scraped together, including this (Patch) Tuesday have caused some ActiveX/Flash problems on my machine. They even crossed over to Firefox, which I was using as a work-around. Adobe should be po'd at the Redmond folks.
A partial fix, for me, was to download the Flash uninstaller from Macromedia, un-install Flash, and then re-install.
But hey, MSFT is just trying to protect us from their own poorly written software. Fools.