Cannot locate elements inside Microsoft HTML Component

I am trying to automate a really old website that uses the Microsoft HTML Components framework and runs only on Internet explorer. I am using IEServerDriver.

Certain components within the page are loaded from a .htc file. Note that these are not in an iframe. So I cannot switch to it. As you can see in the image, they are loaded in a separate html tag below the first one. The issue is that I am not able to locate anything inside the component.

In the image you can see a div with the id theTree_Root. Trying to get this element with

driver.find_element_by_id("theTree_Root")

will just fail. I did also try to wait for elements inside this component (just times out). Even a hard-coded sleep did not work.