Force iexplore (from command line) to 32-bit mode

Question

We have an online movie that displays full-screen.

Instead of the now-standard flash-based fullscreen, which was not available when the movie was originally written, an ActiveX control is used to launch iexplore.exe in kiosk mode.

A rewrite of the movie to fix this glaring problem is scheduled for Q1 next year.

In the mean time, I need to try to find a stopgap for our 64-bit users, as the ActiveX control is currently launching IE's 64-bit version, which obviously can't play our flash-based movie.

We launch IE with the command line command:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -k <url>

Other than replacing the path with the path to the 32-bit version (which would then fail on 32-bit systems) is there anything we can do for our 64-bit users?

Answer 1

Here is the text for a batch file to do it, the first "if" is if it is 32-bit, the second is 64-bit ... just fill in the path to IE and the webpage that you want to open, save as a .bat file and double click to run.

@echo off
Set RegQry=HKLM\Hardware\Description\System\CentralProcessor\0
REG.exe Query %RegQry% > checkOS.txt
Find /i "x86" < CheckOS.txt > StringCheck.txt
If %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
Echo "This is 32 Bit Operating system"
start /d /b "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\" iexplore.exe -k www.google.com
) ELSE (
Echo "This is 64 Bit Operating System"
start /d /b "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\" iexplore.exe -k www.google.com
)

Answer 2

Further study and investigation has lead to no way to make this work. We will either need to advise our users to use 32 bit systems or to use XP mode while working with this.

It is suboptimal, but all we can do without rewriting the ActiveX (using code similar to dcfoster's) or Adobe pushing a flash player for 64-bit.