9
2
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.
Maybe monitoring outlook.exe with Process Explorer could yield some interesting information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
– John T – 2009-09-16T02:55:34.087will try next time this happens – Joel Spolsky – 2009-09-16T03:17:55.323
I've observed something similar on XP, where opening any type of file via DDE seems to hang Explorer for about 15 seconds. I'm pretty confident that Outlook 2007 has been causing this, since the problem goes away if I close Outlook entirely. When I restart Outlook the problem doesn't recur immediately, but within a few minutes it's back to doing the same thing. – Charlie – 2009-10-03T19:55:05.607