applet or activex for a graphical overlay plugin (IE)?

Question

I'm looking to write a plugin for IE that will do a little parsing of any webpage and display a layer atop that page that my users can interact with (an analytics heatmap might be my closest example). I'm trying to decide whether this should be written as an Applet (which I'm leaning towards), or an ActiveX control?

Also, anyone able to pont me toward basic examples would be nice as well.

Answer 1

As you are targeting IE you might want to have a look at BHO (Browser Helper Objects), too:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250436.aspx