We are testing Office 2007 on ~15 machines at our company and nearly half of
them have the problem where Excel files opened from Explorer take over a
minute to open up. They open right up if you open the file from Excel though.

I've cleared out the XLSTART folder as the PDFWriter.xla transferred over
from their Office 2003 installs.

As I look to roll this out for the entire company I do not want to have to
use some registry hack to change the DDE settings for XLS files if I don't
have to. Thanks to Martin for sharing this trick but I would like to know
what is causing this discrepancy among machines because Martin's trick worked
for one of our machines but the problem came back even with the %1 in the DDE
settings.

Has anyone else uncovered what causes this or a more permanent solution to
use in deployment planning? Thanks!