Windows 7: Any experts out there?

I have been having two seperate issues, although they may be related, that have been driving me crazy and hope somebody can help.

First, I have lost my ability to cut/copy and paste. For example when I copy a cell in Excel it appears to have taken the command, yet the paste option is greyed out and unavailable. Possibly something to do with the clipboard?

Second, I recently installed the Beta of Windows Live Mail (WLM) and have lost my ability to open hyperlinks by clicking on them in an email. The link address appears in the status bar and the pointer changes correctly but nothing happens when clicked. I can 'copy shortcut' and immediately paste it into a browser address bar, but if I have to do any other actions prior to pasting such as opening a new tab the copied information disappears and the paste option is not available. The solution offered by MS was to make IE my default browser which does not make a difference. Seems like the problem should be in the WLM application, not the browser. I've tried all the settings to no avail.

Also, I've recently used a few optimization programs and may have inadvertantly changed a setting affecting the way memory is utilized. All virus and malware checks come up clean.

Any help is appreciated!

Can you copy from Excel and then paste into notepad?

Good question with a bad answer: It depends. Repeating the exact same procedure each time here are the results: Grayed out paste, paste available, grayed out paste, PASTED correctly, Pasted correctly, gray, gray, pasted, pasted, blank, etc... Very strange behavior. Same results using Word. BTW, Word is affected with the same issue. I copied a line of text and repeatedly pasted in the same document and got similar results.

When you copy a cell (or a range of cells) do you see the dotted lines everytime?

Also, what if you use ctl-c and ctl-v

Try a Clean Boot of Windows 7. If the problem goes away follow direction to figure out what is causing the problem.

Yep, dotted lines every time. It seems to be losing the information somewhere after the copy and before the paste. Ctrl-C/V gives the same intermittent paste results.

Perhaps you should consider repairing the install of Office and/or Windows7. I would start with repairing office first.