Although this is probably a rare and fairly random issue, I thought I'd write a blog to address it because it was so darn hard to track down.
While building a webapp for my company, once we turned SSL on we faced some common gotchas (and some not so common) that most SSL websites face. One such issue was trying to suppress the warning that Internet Explorer gives about accessing secure and insecure data from the same page.

Watir is a great tool for automating web tests. It controls IE through its COM interface. Unfortunately however, Watir has no easy method for attaching to an embedded IE window. Google searches on the topic have little to offer on the topic. One poster offers a solution which he/she thought would work but failed in the end.

I have yet to come up a working solution for attaching to the com interface of an embedded IE browser using ruby. However, you can attach to an embedded IE instance using autoit's UDF (User Defined Functions) library called IE.au3.