Well from what I read about dde, is it's an older process and will only run one process at a time, causing it to take quite a bit, which is why I initially unchecked dde thinking that it might help which it did. Now the confusing thing is if it's supposed to be the bridge between oe and ie.. Then what's the bridge with it unchecked? Hrmm fascinating indeed Oh well I'll mark this as solved now because the rest of it's really just theoretical and possibility's that you guys can give me.

I have to add to this. I had a day which I did a bunch of updates to my XP x64 install- Windows updates, defrag, registry clean, and spyware sweep. A day or two later my Office suite (Word and Excel in particular) were running extremely slow. The apps would take sometimes minutes before they would pull open.

The other thing I started noticing was that links from Windows Live Messenger as well as Outlook also started experiencing these painful slowdowns.

My system specs are pretty high currently.

I have a custom built:
8 gigs DDR RAM
Dual Quad Core Core 5160s

So, there's really no reason why any of this should be running slow.

My first instinct was that it was a virus so I scanned for that several times. Then secondly, I thought it may have been the new AVG causing this - I uninstalled and still had these issues.

Over time, I realized that if opened up the process manager, it would often kick in/start up these applications. It was weird, but it worked some of the time.

Finally, I came across this thread. The problem is such a generic term that it is almost like finding a needle in a haystack.

I disabled DDE for this and suddenly my computer is back to normal again regarding the links. It actually seems better (and much faster) than ever.

I will have to wait a few days and see how the rest of the Office suite performs.

Thanks again for the help here. I thought it was my imagination or something which I screwed up somehow.