Internet Explorer 6 is slow to start under Win98SE

[Colin4228]

Starting from the desktop, IE6 has recently begun to take 20-30 seconds to open. Disc activity is observed as soon as the icon is clicked, but no home page appears until after this delay. Previously IE6 opened more or less immediately, and still does so on another near-identical computer. Once open, IE6 runs fine. There is no corresponding problem with my outlook express.I can not associate the slow-down with any hardware or software action on the machine.

Any suggestions welcomed. Not a huge problem, but more a niggle.

[Colin4228]

I believe that I have solved this problem, and am posting this further note in the hope that it may assist another site user now or in the future. I traced the problem of slow Internet Explorer operation at program start-up to my use of Dragon Naturally Speaking. I am using version 7.0 of this program from SCANSOFT.Installation of the DRAGON software results in three .dll files being placed in the Program Files / Internet Explorer folder. They were dd10midl, dmfc6 and dnstk10. I am unsure what is the function of these files in terms of DRAGON, but upon removing them from the Internet Explorer program folder the normal speed of operation of Internet Explorer 6 was regained.

So the point to note is that DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING software can adversely interact with Internet Explorer. Further reference may be found to this problem at the SCANSOFT support website.

(The Dragon programme is a voice-to-text facility which enables the user to dictate words from a microphone into MS Office and E-mail programmes rather than type. With "training" it works very well). I have yet to find what function of DRAGON has been de-graded by the deletion of these .dll files.It still seems to work fine. Of course, it is a good idea to copy files to another spare folder before deleting them, so that the "fix" can be reversed if desired and the files restored.