Clicking hyperlinks in Email messages becomes painfully slow
- by Joel Spolsky
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.