Expect more of this soon
Microsoft's commitment to rapid product releases and bundling security patches with behavior changes is going to assure that we have these problems more frequently. In The Real World, it's not uncommon for an "enterprisey" business system to be deployed that takes advantages of certain "features" in an OS, browser, etc. Said system is usually one-off, costs tons of money to replace or fix, and can't easily be extracted from day to day business operations. Yes, running something like IE 6 or unpatched JRE 1.4 is awful, but sometimes it's necessary. The consultants who build said systems are already long gone and often demand huge sums when they are called back to update these kinds of applications.
I'm hoping that if Microsoft stops releasing discrete "versions" of their products, as they're rumored to be considering, they'll at least do a Long Term Stable branch like some of the Linux distributions do. That LTS branch can have the old patch framework -- patches are patches and feature updates are optional.
We're currently dealing with this fun combined feature/patch...identifying and fixing this on a universal basis for everyone in our organization is going to be fun.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/06/internet-explorer-begins-blocking-out-of-date-activex-controls.aspx