ActiveX control and IE interoperability...

Hi all,
New at this forum, hope some of you guys can help me...

A short backgrounder:
On an ASP page I have added a custom written ActiveX control (.ocx). The purpose of the control is to talk to a smartcard reader API that exists locally on all requesting clients, get the ID of the current SmartCard inserted in the SmartCard reader at the client, and post this ID to another ASP page that uses the
provided ID to authenticate the user to the web appl.

Question 1)
Which approches exist for initializing a client side ActiveX control?
I have tried adding public properties to the ActiveX, and set them
using clientside Javascript code in windows_onload and that works fine. Also tried <object...><param name="..." value="..."></object>, but that did not work...

Question 2)
How can an ActiveX control access the hosting container (or IE in this case to be more specific). Would like to set a hidden field on the HTML page from within the ActiveX and post the page to the webserver.

Thanks in advise!