Clicking hyperlinks in Email messages becomes painfully slow

Posted by Joel Spolsky on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Joel Spolsky
Published on 2009-09-16T02:04:22Z Indexed on 2012/11/17 5:05 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 357

Filed under:

windows-7

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outlook

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outlook-2007

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dde

Running Windows 7 (RC, 64 bit). Suddenly, today, after months without a problem, clicking on links has become extremely slow.

I've noticed this in two places.

(1) clicking hyperlinks in Outlook email messages, which launches Firefox, takes around a minute. Launching Firefox by itself is instantaneous - I have an SSD drive and a very fast CPU. (2) opening Word documents attached to Outlook email messages also takes a surprisingly long time.

The only thing these two might have in common is that they use the DDE mechanism, if I'm not mistaken, to send a DDE open command to the application. Under Windows XP this problem could sometimes be fixed by unchecking the "Use DDE" checkbox in the file type mapping, however, I can't find any equivalent under Windows 7.

See here for someone else having what I believe is the same problem. See here for more evidence that it's DDE being super-super-slow.

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