Stalling of Excel when using DDE

I have several Excel sheets that utilize DDE for values from MT4. Yesterday I opened my sheets to find that all of them would stall when trying to access the DDE values. After a little investigative work, uninstall, reinstall, uninstall, reinstall, uninstall, reinstall, etc. & etc., I found a specific cause. It was an Office 3000 Update which I had recently downloaded, *** Update for Outlook Junk Email Filter 2003 (KB923095) ***. I do not know what this has to do with DDE but it is one critical update that I can do without. If you find that your Excel apps with DDE are stalling, you may want to check if you have this installed and if so remove it. This is an Office Update which you have to specifically request from Microsoft not a Windows Update which you may have set for automatic updates.

I have had the same problem recently and never would of thought that this would fix it!

Thank you so much for sharing the solution!

It was not the same update as you described, so I tried to uninstall all of them. Then reboot and DDE was working again.