I noticed several people complaining over the internet about the active
desktop on XP when IE 7 gets installed, so I decided to research it and
quickly came with a very simple solution.

After installing IE 7 on a Windows XP machine, you will notice some small
issues on the OS because IE 7 was designed specially to Windows Vista and
above. One of these issues is the Active Desktop incompatibility. This
happens because Active Desktop was replaced by the 'Gadgets' feature on
Windows Vista, becoming obsolete since IE 7.

Sometimes the desktop wallpaper experiences some problem and Windows
automatically display the safemode.htt page, that has a button called restore
active desktop (or something like that). If you click the button a script
error happens (object doesnt support the action) and the wallpaper remain in
that page. This happens because the Activex Control responsible for this
method being called by the page when the button is clicked has been updated
and no longer works properly. I am talking about the Shell.UIHelper Activex.
But, fortunately there is a very simple and easy solution for this. All you
have to do is edit a registry value :

At :

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{64AB4BB7-111E-11d1-8F79-00C04FC2FBE1}\InProcServer32

edit the default string value data (value without a name) from
C:\windows\system32\ieframe.dll to c:\windows\ie7\shdocvw.dll

Make sure the path is valid and the shdocvw.dll file really exists in the
IE7 folder, which by default is HIDDEN. This is a folder having IE 6 and its
files, in case you want to go back from IE 7 to IE 6. I am also guessing this
folder is also created on Windows 2003 when you install IE 7. a Sample
registry script to automate the task :

-Fix Active Desktop problems on XP with IE 7 installed.reg-

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{64AB4BB7-111E-11d1-8F79-00C04FC2FBE1}\InProcServer32]
@="c:\\WINDOWS\\IE7\\SHDOCVW.DLL"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

-Turn it back to default value when IE 7 is installed.reg-

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{64AB4BB7-111E-11d1-8F79-00C04FC2FBE1}\InProcServer32]
@="c:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\ieframe.DLL"

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hope this helps

ps: Microsoft shouldnt have changed the shelluihelper activex inprocserver32
entry, it just annoyed a lot of people due to the incompatibility issue.
Maybe a small patch should be delivered to users via automatic updates, after
all this is sooo simple