After experiencing the slow 8.5. DDE I wanted to upgrade to DDE 8.5.1. (and the client of course) asap after the official release.
And yes, as you can guess for the title of this post I ran into some trouble. The first time I installed 8.5.1., as I was used to from the past, over the 8.5 installation.
After the install finished I enthousiastically double clicked the Client icon, but to my suprise after the 8.5 splash image disappeared nothing seemed to happen for a while. Until well after 10 minutes, the client window appeared. I eagerly clicked on to the DDE, but no results.
Found on Planet Lotus some hints to first uninstalling the old client before installing the new one. Did that, but still no fast opening client. In fact still over 10 minutes before the client opened and no results on the DDE.
As a last resort, I removed the installed 8.5.1. clients again, did a cleanup of the registry, rebooted the pc and reinstalled again.
After successfull install, rebooted the pc (better safe than sorry) and clicked the client icon again.
And again *sigh* it took over 10 minutes before the client loaded. This time though I had the fortune to be away from my desk to fetch the collegues some coffee.
And when I came back to my pc, a dialog was hovering over the 8.5.1. client with a message: "Client Setup completed, click ok to restart". This dialog probably also displayed on the previous 2 attempts, but was probably hidden behind active windows.
Now the client opens just fine, as does the 8.5.1 DDE. And lightning fast compared to the 8.5 version.
So beware if the client opens slowly the first time after the install and wait for that dialog setup complete message.
From the comments on various blogs, it appear I ma no alone in my experience and IBM should at least hint to a slow first startup on the install screens/instructions to avoid this confusion.
Good luck with your installs.
