1 c/o Y. Ogawar, ISAS, 3-1-1 Yoshinodai, Sagamihara, Kanagawa, JAPAN 229

2 Department of Physics, 264 EPS Building, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717

"Slow LDEs" are soft X-ray flare events in which the rise time, as well as the decay time, is slow. Celebrated examples of such events include February 21, 1992 (the "candle flame" cusp event) and August 28, 1992 (a prototype coronal dimming event). We have found another striking example in an event of January 20, 1999, which exhibits a fan-like X-ray structure above the post-flare loop system, as also observed in the August 28, 1992 event. We show that slow LDEs normally follow the pattern of the Neupert effect, in that long-lived weak hard X-ray fluxes occur throughout the (slow) rise phase. Current hard X-ray imaging instruments have been unable thus far to image a weak coronal hard X-ray component associated with events of these types, but HESSI may be able to do so. We discuss the Yohkoh observations in the context of large-scale magnetic reconnection models.