Clipboard stops working

Twice in recent weeks the Windows clipboard has stopped working. I can't copy anything to it or paste anything from it; I have to reboot the computer to get it to work again. I have Windows 7 Pro 64-bit SP1 on a Dell Inspiron 580 with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM.

When I tried to reboot the computer after this happened, several programs had a variety of issues shutting down, and had to be shut down manually (with Alt+F4 or the X in the top right of their windows, not with Task Manager). Only after these manual closings would Windows shut down and reboot. Thus it seemed that something had caused a fairly widespread problem in the OS. I had never seen anything like any of this before.

Note that I was not using any MS Office software when this happened, not even IE. However, I was using ClipCache, a clipboard enhancement program. I believe that on both occasions I used a hotkey combination to paste something from ClipCache just before the problem occurred, and I have a support request in to them. However, I have used ClipCache for many, many years without anything like this happening.

It's possible that this is all somehow due to ClipCache, but I do wonder if anyone else has seen anything like this, with the clipboard just stopping. Thanks for any suggestions.

Thanks. That certainly makes sense, I'm just not understanding why it started happening all of a sudden, and why I get all these shutdown problems with other programs when I reboot. But I hope for some clarification from the ClipCache folks.

When I hit the Windows Key and then hit Shut Down, the usual shutdown process starts, but I'll get the message that one program is preventing Windows from shutting down, for instance Scrivener (a writing program). I hit cancel, and Scrivener will have an error about accessing a file. I close Scrivener manually, try to shut down again, and this time a different program will be preventing it. Cancel again, deal with that program's error message, try shutting down again, and another program is preventing it. Each program has a different kind of error message.

The whole thing is bizarre, and unlike anything I've experienced in 30 years of using personal computers. It's these shutdown errors that make me wonder if there's something going on besides a problem with ClipCache. The most recent Windows update was June 11. Conceivably it could have introduced some sort of conflict; but the first instance of this didn't happen till June 22.

If the problem can be traced to something with ClipCache, hopefully it can be fixed. I've used ClipCache for so long that it's become intrinsic to my work flow, so uninstalling would be a later-than-last resort.

I appreciate the advice, but from my perspective, the problem has been so recent, so unreproducible, and so uncommon that uninstalling a program I use a dozen times an hour feels like overkill. But in fact I haven't updated to the latest version, Ztruker, and since I expect that will also be ClipCache tech support's suggestion I might as well go ahead and do that anyway. (I hadn't done it before because all it seems to do is add a Polish-language translation to the interface.) Apologies if this turns out to be totally unrelated to Win7.