How to keep dropdown menu on top of ActiveX

Question

I have a drop-down menu created by JavaScript on all pages and some columns have up to 20 items. This drop-down appears topmost over all content in Mozilla browsers but in Internet Explorer it gets partially covered when an ActiveX object is displayed just below it.

I have tried displaying the ActiveX in a DIV layer and setting z-index but so far I haven't found a solution that works. Adding style to the object tag had no effect...

<object etc style='z-index:3;'>

Applying style to a DIV containing the object also had no effect...

<div align="center" style="z-index:2;">

The dropdown menu has a z-index=1 applied. Adding a 'wmode' parameter to the object also did not work...

<param name='wmode' value='transparent'>

Answer 1

Apparently the issue is in-process vs out-of-process plugins. In-process plugins (and activex) will run in the same environment as the web page itself and honour z-ordering. But in-process is rare. Most browsers run plugins and activex in a separate process, so the web page is in one process and the activex/plugin is in a different process. The browser makes it APPEAR like it’s a single process by causing the plugin/activex to DRAW itself in the screen area containing the web page, but you understand its smoke and mirrors and z-ordering is practically ignored. It draws the web page (including menus) and THEN it causes the plugin/activex to draw.

The only way around it (and doesn’t always work) is to wrap the html menu in an iframe.