Clicking hyperlinks in Email messages becomes painfully slow

"I'm getting a little bit closer.

Rebooting fixed the problem. :) Not that that is a permanent solution...

According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen, DDE is supposed to be obsolete, but everybody seems to still be using it.

The trouble with DDE, he says, is that it's cooperative, and one hung application can cause all other applications to not respond properly when they try to use DDE.

In my case, rebooting fixed the problem because it closed whichever application it was that was failing to respond properly to the DDE messages.

A common solution to this problem in the Windows XP timeframe was to uncheck the USE DDE box in the file type handler, but that checkbox appears to no longer exist in Windows 7. Even though DDE is obsolete, applications still register it in the registry so stupid apps like Outlook 2007 still use it to launch hyperlinks.

This solution wasn't very useful, because even stupider apps, like Firefox, were so intent on using DDE that they would REREGISTER themselves as using DDE every time they launched. The only permanent solution was changing the security settings on the appropriate key in the registry so that Firefox didn't have the ability to write to it.

I'm still not very happy with this answer."

"I had a similar problem not too long ago, and the issue was definitely with Outlook, it became dead slow opening links and attachments. in my case it was the PST file which had grown beyond 4 GB.

Try compacting your PST or OST file:

Tools | Account settings
Click on the Data Files tab
Select your mailbox and click Settings
[Exchange mode] In the Advanced tab, click on the Offline Folder File Settings
Click Compact Now

MSKB has a few more tips: How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007"

"I have tried all of the suggestions above with no success. It's very frustrating to wait one full minute after clicking a hyperlink before it displays in Firefox. And if you click more than once, every click displays as a different tab.

So here is my workaround, which works but is still annoying.

When you want to activate a hyperlink:

Right-click it - do not left-click since that will launch your 60-second wait;
Copy the internet URL address shown, and then
Simply paste the link into your browser and press Enter. Your page instantly appears.

This works every time because you are bypassing the bug in Outlook somehow preventing us from connecting directly."

"This answer is somewhat related to your issue
and may give you a clue to look some place else for the fix.
Have a quick read at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929867
Good luck."

"I have to do the following to fix this problem:

Set Internet Explorer to default browser (on my system I actually have to use Safari to set IE to default strangely enough)
Reboot
With Firefox set to check if it is default browser, open Firefox and choose Yes to set it as default browser.

I have to do this once a week and I haven't figured out the larger reason for this."