That module is obsolete. Put "LSUseSystemDDE" into your step.rc instead. In fact, loading msdde in 0.24.7 may make matters even worse, because .7 already includes an internal DDE server (based on liteman.dll), so they might conflict. LSUseSystemDDE tells .7 to switch to the "msdde" method. It has a few sideeffects (especially with older systray modules), that's why it's not enabled by default.