I think I used my quota of good luck up getting UISS and CAT7200 running on my Win10 laptop. That laptop had a fresh install of Win10 32-bit on it, so it had no legacy files from prior Windows versions.
When I added in the SatGate 2 Module to UISS (provides a sGate function — routing packets received from the ISS or other packet satellites onto the APRS network), I received an error that “MSCOMCTL.OCX” was missing. A bit of Googling had me understanding that it was part of the ActiveX controls that Microsoft started rolling out around 1996 and it was no longer supported in Windows 10. But when those controls existed, they were in a directory called C:\Windows\sysWOW64, a directory that didn’t exist on my laptop.
I checked my desktop PC which had been running Win 7, and probably XP before that. Sure enough, the C:\Windows\sysWOW64 directory existed, and MSCOMCTL.OCX, dated April 15, 2005 was sitting in that directory.
So I did the following on my laptop:
- I created a C:\Windows\sysWow64 directory, letting Win10 security know that I really wanted to do that.
- I copied my MSCOMCTL.OCX file into that new directory
- I registered the ActiveX control by entering CMD<CTRL><SHIFT><ENTER> which opened up a command window with elevated privlidges.
- I ran regsvr32 C:\Windows\sysWOW64\mscomctl.ocx
That successfully registered mscomctl.ocx, the only ActiveX file in that directory (note the elevated CMD and the location are critical — errors will happen if you don’t do those things correctly).
Now the SatGate 2 Module will start under UISS, and appears to be working.
While this is a work-around that gets things going, I am not happy about having an ActiveX control, notoriously full of security holes, on either my desktop or laptop — especially because the last security fix was dated 6/7/2012, 7 years after the version I have. Eek.
Interesting reading here: http://www.fmsinc.com/microsoftaccess/controls/mscomctl/
And here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2597986
After reading the above, it appears I should have installed the MSCOMCTL.OCX file into the C:/Windows/system32 directory instead. But it is working where it is, and I suspect that is because I used regsvr32.
