Using DDE On Win2000 Terminal Server

I have written a application that gets data from a PLC device. This app resides on a Windows 2000 server running terminal service. It uses netdde. We have not been able to get dde to get data from the PLC device. We are trying this on the server itself, not from a terminal client. After several hours of troubleshooting we got it to work, but only if Microsoft Excel is running a DDE app. Is there any issues I need to be aware of running Netdde on the terminal server? It seems that I have had problems in the past.

Thanks,
Jeff