[ul][li]Regarding the ActiveX plugin:
[quote="michaelkenward"]If Word is open, DOpus renders .doc files almost instantly.
Looking at Task Manager, DOpus with ActiveX is loading and unloading Winword.
You probably knew all that, I am just trying to understand it myself.[/quote]
You were researching something I had already explained in the first paragraph of the first reply to this thread (excluding the two replies from Bryan adding more info to original post before anyone else had said anything):
[quote="leo"]If Word and Adobe Reader are what's being used to view their respective formats then (of course) they are what the ActiveX plugin has to load to view those formats. If they are already loaded and running then the plugin doesn't have to load them as they are already there.
If you want to speed things up you can use something else to view the formats.[/quote]
To reiterate: The ActiveX plugin will be slow if it needs to load Office because loading Office is slow. If you have Office 2007 then the ActiveX plugin will use the preview handlers which are very fast (but not available before Office 2007). If you don't have Office 2007 and want faster viewing then the MultiView plugin is the best bet.
[/li]
[li]As for the MultiView plugin:
Try the new version of the MultiView plugin that is attached at the bottom of this post. It eliminates the delay when you switch from .doc to .txt to .doc (and similar). You will only see that delay if you have not used the MultiView plugin for several minutes.
I made a video showing the sort of speed that I get with this new version: MultiView_Speed.zip (4MB, WMV)
I tried on my year-old Vista Desktop and my 3-year-old XP laptop and they were about the same speed. There is about a 1.5 second delay the first time MultiView is used and after that it loads things almost instantly, even if the viewer is closed and re-opened. (Half the doc files were copies of a large ~600KB document, too.)
I used the DLLs which came with the installer that IzDwku linked. They're reported as version 8.1.9.4407 in the MultiView config window.
(This new MultiView DLL also ignores XML files as I noticed the old one did a diabolical job of displaying the format.)[/li][/ul]
Edit: I've deleted the attached DLL to avoid having old versions kicking around and confusing things. It'll be included in the forthcoming Opus update.