MacLinkPlus and delays in opening Claris documents

Recently, when I opened a document from the Open dialog box of any of my Claris applications (such as ClarisWorks and ClarisDraw), there was a noticeable delay of about 3 or 4 seconds from when I selected to open the file to when it first actually started to open - a delay that I had not seen before. I did not think much of this until a colleague of mine (Robbie Stewart) reported the same symptom - except that his delay (on his slower Mac) was more like 20 seconds! A little research on both of our parts determined that the culprit appeared to be the MacLinkPlus Setup control panel. When we disabled MacLinkPlus, the delay disappeared.

When I queried Scott Thomas (of DataViz) about this, he replied that ClarisWorks applications use a translation system called XTND to aid in opening files. MacLinkPlus translators work with XTND, but if you have many XTND translators in addition to using MacLinkPlus, you may get this sort of delay. Ideally, XTND should minimize these delays by automatically rebuilding the XTND Translator List file (as stored in your Preferences folder) as needed. Otherwise, deleting the file yourself will force it to rebuild. These may help reduce or eliminate the delay. If not, Scott offers a work-around that he prefers to simply turning off MacLinkPlus. The work-around disables MacLinkPlus only for applications that use XTND:

1. Quit all XTND applications (like ClarisWorks)
2. Remove the file MacLinkPlus Bridge from the Claris Translators folder
3. Trash the file XTND Translator List in the Preferences folder
4. Start the XTND application (you'll notice a pause as it rebuilds the XTND Translator List minus MLP)

If you also use Macintosh Easy Open, there may be additional things to consider. Check this DataViz web page for details.