I agree flash would be much better. I have looked at ActiveX and nowhere are there tutorials for making them, most use the old visual basic 6.0 to make. ActiveX is out dated. Flash would be best.
I downloaded cygwin and installed it. I also downloaded adobe alchemy, flex sdk, and a few other things. In the end it appears to be way too complicated. I couldn't even figure out how to create a PATH variable.
I have also been looking at
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/Since I use google chrome as my browser of choice.