Symptoms
Occasionally, when trying to start Word, Excel and certain other applications, it can take up to 30 seconds before the application even tries to start after having been launched.
Cause
This may be due to a problem in the Softalk Share Server standard communication protocol, which means that Outlook will sometimes fail to respond to top level DDE requests.
Resolution
If you experience this problem, configure the Softalk Share Server to listen on both the standard and secure ports and then configure the Softalk Share Server data store in Outlook to communicate with the server on the secure port.
To improve response, set Softalk Share Server to listen on both secure and standard ports by double clicking on the Settings entry in the left hand list of the Administrator. Once you have selected the Listen on both secure and standard ports, restart the Softalk Share Server service.
Then set Outlook to communicate only on the secure port by opening the Mail applet in Control Panel and clicking Data Files. Locate the Softalk Share Server store and double click on it. In the store settings dialog, tick the Use SSL Encryption tick box and press OK.
Now restart Outlook.
If any problems are experienced when using SSL, switch back to the standard port once more using the Mail applet in Control panel. The server can continue to listen on both the secure and standard port.