What is DDE, and how could it crash Explorer?

[dakota81]

I was quickly looking at an XP machine where when someone would try to double-click on MS Office documents, Explorer would promptly crash (from task manager I could end explorer.exe & restart it).

Trying to open say a Word document from the command prompt worked fine, so I adjusted the Windows file association by unchecking the "Use DDE" option & adjusting the command parameters accordingly. Now those file associations I adjusted work like they should.

So now I'm curious what DDE is and why might it be crashing Explorer? Just a freak occurrance?

 

[devil966]

DDE stands for Dynamic Data Exchange. On my machine, I use it to import Bloomberg data into Excel but I believe Windows can use it to allow any two programs to share data. Perhaps there is no longer a data feed, so it crashes?

 

[linney]

Programs that use Dynamic Data Exchange may stop responding in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837689&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH