It is what I would expect. As stated, there are a few things, like chrome, updates, drivers, etc. that can cause problems with your DDE. First I would start your computer and then start shutting down all the running processes and test the DDE. See if you can find one that is obviously not running in safe mode, but is running when you restart normally and causing the problems.
here is the solution for anyone looking: from the command line in Windows, type in: taskkill /f /im rundll32.exe the rundll32.exe*32 process from Chrome is what is interfering with the links. hope this helps
Same thing for me with TOS DDE links. Haven't bothered troubleshooting because I have multiple feeds. Will have to try these suggestions though... FYI, all machines I've had the trouble on are Win7 64bit. Never imagined Chrome might be the culprit though.
I've had the same issue and I've never installed Chrome on my machine. In fact, up until recently, the DDE worked with Office 2010 just fine. Is there a way to roll back TOS to see if it was a TOS update that caused the problems?
From what I gather, it is a problem with 32-bit rundll files (such as chromes internal flash plugin) in a 64-bit system folder. Printers, various browser upgrades, etc. could make use of these rundll libraries. Killing those processes should fix the issue.
I have windows 7 64bit and have no trouble with the TOS dde right now. Chrome definitely stops the dde, you have to establish the dde link and have it going then open Chrome. As EEUT84 mentioned, there is most likely something running that is causing a problem, or a corrupt spreadsheet. I have even had a problem with a single cell in a worksheet causing the whole dde to hang.
I was having a similar problem with IB's TwsDDE Excel workbook. When trying to import market data, Excel would hang. For whatever reason, Firefox's "plugin-container" process seems to interfere with DDE and when I kill that process in Task Manager, the IB Excel sheet works fine again.
I was having a similar problem running DDE off TOS into Excel on Win 7 x64 with firefox as my principal browser. I ultimately got the DDE linkage running into excel by fiddling around with the system properties on excel and letting it run as an administrator and trying the compatibility modes until it worked. Don't recall exact solution - will post if I remember. I didn't feel firefox was the issue. Was maddening for a few days. As an aside, isn't it annoying that TOS doesn't send date/time stamp data through the DDE? Pain in the rear. (TOS, are you listening?)
Just to clarify, it is not Firefox that directly is causing my problem. It is the "plugin-container.exe" process that runs when Firefox starts (presumably to prevent a crashing add-in to take down the entire browser). As long as I kill the "plugin-container.exe" process, Firefox can still run without causing any problem with the DDE enabled Excel workbook. To automatically get this to work, prior to running any procedure to import any data via DDE, I run a macro to kill the "plugin-container.exe" process. Since the process doesn't seem to reappear unless you restart Firefox, adding a macro that kills the plugin-container.exe process when the Excel workbook is opened should take care of the issue. Here is a link that has the code for how to kill a specified process using VBA. http://www.vbaexpress.com/kb/getarticle.php?kb_id=811 Obviously you should changed the code to not show any msg box prompt and change the name of the process to kill.
You can circumvent TOS limitation. 1- Within the trade tab, click on the layout and select customize. 2- Create 2 custom ThinkScript to return both the date of last trade and time elapsed from open *Date: you can return the date using the built-in function getYyyyMmDd() make sure you select aggregate as D (day) and give the custom field a nice name. *Time: return the amount of seconds since the market opened on that day. The time must be given in EST, so secondsFromTime(0930) make sure you select aggregate as 1m. 3- To find out the latest trade of the underlying, use the ATM option. Obviously this would work for highly liquid optionable securities. Liquid because someone would be buying every tick. You will quickly see that the date and time on the option chain indicates the last date and time (simply convert the seconds to min and hour and add to 9:30 then convert to your time zone). So some option strike may say loading, it means it never traded. I hope this helps.