Again and again no text showing up anywhere. At first I thought it was limited to the browser, then discover its computer wide. No pasting into notepad, a command prompt, anywhere.
Looking around the web I find that its not an uncommon error. The few times its mentioned in official blogs there are normally dozens of comments from people looking for solutions, with little offered.
Heres a page that lists most of the common solutions in various posts.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5bbc11e8-ca2d-41ac-b640-d66ce971f58f/copy-paste-clipboard-issues-not-working?forum=w7itprogeneral
Of course.. for me none of that worked. I imagine, since you're still reading it hasn't worked for you either. I did finally come across an obscure programming tool that got me through without having to reboot. That was the goal.
Look for:
getopenclipboardwindow.zip
I got mine from here:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/temp/GetOpenClipboardWindow.zip
Of course you should try to make sure that your source is as reputable as possible. Try to avoid the links from pastebin and others unless you have some reason to trust the original poster. No need to sneak in a whole new problem while we solve this one.
Run the program therein. What does it do? It may show an error initially, but then it will come up with a window showing you the 'pid' of the process that is the problem. P.I.D. is the 'process id' number, a unique number that every process running on your computer gets.
If this solution is going to help the program will start a window with this line:
"PID of process with clipboard opened is" Followed by a number. That number is what you want.
Apparently the issue can be that a process (what most of us call a program) keeps the clipboard open and locks it. From there nothing else on the computer can make use of it. In my case it was soffice.exe from libreoffice that was the culprit. In my case I had closed the program days before, but it had never actually gone away.
What do you do with a pid? Well it differs with different operating systems. This is for win 10, where I experienced the problem, but similar solutions can be found for all versions.
Right click on the task bar and hit 'Task Manager' to start that up. Go to the 'Details' tab, and from there hit the top of the 'Pid' column. That sorts all the processes that you have running by the process id. Scroll down to the id number that you found above.
Highlight that process in the list. Then hit the 'End Task' button. That will kill off the offending application. In my case this ended the problem. It may well come back if that program is run again, so be aware, and decide if you want to keep that particular program.
