Your post made me laugh because I feel the same way sometimes, but I haven't found ActiveX to be dangerous. Here is a short explanation of ActiveX.
ActiveX controls were originally called "OLE Controls", and
were required to provide all of these interfaces but that
requirement was dropped, and the name changed, to make ActiveX
controls lean enough to be downloaded as part of a web page.
Because ActiveX components can support the OLE embedding
interfaces, they can be included in web pages. Because they
are COM objects, they can be used from languages such as
Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, VBScript.
"Understanding ActiveX and OLE", David Chappell, MS Press,
1996].