It is the apps tied to ActiveX that cause the problems
[I work in NHS IT]
Some of those places worst affected are just poorly managed but the reason why somewhere like Royal London (a new £1bn hospital) kept all these PCs with XP was that certain critical software could not be (cheaply) updated because it needed XP because the browser interface was written with a load of ActiveX that only worked in Internet Explorer 6 which is part of XP.
The root cause of these issues is therefore Microsoft's use of non-standard extentions as part of the embrace / extend / extinguish browswer wars.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
