Why does ADE take so long to open?

[John233422534vrf]

On my PC (with a 12th gen i5!) Adobe Digital Editions 4.5.12.112 takes nine seconds to start. Maybe this doesn't seem that long, but when I'm double clicking through a list of epubs looking for a book it feels painfully slow. I have seen lots of posts here saying ADE runs slow, but for me it is only slow to start. Once it has started I find it works very well.

If I run Task Manager I see ADE is not using any CPU while it's starting, and if I run it on a much slower PC it still takes the same nine seconds, So I'm guessing the cause is something like ADE attempting to communicate with some Adobe server on startup and timing out. Some form of timeout is the only explanation I can think of for the startup to be slow but not to use any CPU.

Whatever the cause, does anyone know why the startup is so slow and how to fix it?

For years and years I used ADE v2.0 and I sure it always used to start instantly, but then at some point in the past it suddenly started taking a long time to open - I can't remember when this started but it was years ago. I switched to the current version only to find it too has the same nine second start time.

[John233422534vrf · Accepted solution]

By accident I have found a workaround. If I configure the Windows firewall to block all outgoing connections from Digital Editions then it starts in a couple of seconds. Clearly the long delay is ADE attempting to make some connection with an external server, though what exactly it is doing is unclear.

This isn't an ideal solution since it will stop ADE from authorising books, but at least it reduces the pain.