Clipboard problems (can not copy/paste) in Windows 11

Dean, please let us know if this works. I have had no issues for over two weeks. Appears to be fixed. I have a call with Microsoft Level 3 and engineers Wednesday. I'm trying to get them to roll this small change out in their next windows update.

Excellent suggestion, however, i reboot lets say 9am, the copy and paste function works perfect until i leave the office at 6pm.

when i get back in the morning the copy and paste function has failed and i need to reboot.

However, it is very consistent and has failed each time i come in so i will give this a go tomorrow.

i too get an excel error "the clipboard is in use" etc. copy and pasting a file doesn't work and right clicking explorer.exe to get to my pin list doesn't so there are a lot of signs.

i will give this a go and report back what i may or may not have found!

I'm sorry to hear that, but perhaps you can take the content and use it in the same manner... to investigate.

Reboot until that telltale moment that gives you the idea it has failed. For me, it was when I tried to open Windows Explorer would lose its address bar.

As soon as that happens, try copying pasting a bunch of times. My utmost success in finding the error after the internal crash was trying to copy from Excel into a different software.

After you force the error, open the Event Viewer, go into the Windows logs in the tree on the left and find the application logs… give it a moment to populate because there's a lot of data in there.  Find the red error icons, there should be a sea of them.  Look at the details of each one. Are they similar  Which CLSID can you see popping up the most?  You could reverse-search it through the root, but the first step is to find who is responsible.

I’ll help you where I can.

** A CLSID will look like a GUID, or a random string of number separated by hyphens, possibly enclosed in curly brackets

(e.g. {04CD1C44-3914-48E4-844E-F7D3519BC89A})

First, as you all know, everyone was right, it was not the Windows Clip history; I found out not long after the post... Sorry, I'll removed the 'SOLVED's.

I didn't stop searching there, I couldn't. It was too troublesome to my day. I believe I have actually found the culprit, apologies for not posting earlier. It has been a week now since I've had to reboot (fingers crossed).

The problem seemed to be getting worse for me. I would constantly receive messages from Excel saying that 'Something is using the clipboard. Content can only be pasted within Excel'... not very useful.

I started digging into the Event Viewer to see if I could catch it. I chased each error by the CLSID in ROOT to the find the AppID it was calling on, and everytime, it was the same:

CLSID - {F94358B1-E9AE-4D5C-AF66-CE50E67803C7}

AppID - {5E176815-9A63-4A69-810F-62E90D36612A}

This app, the 'Connected Devices Platform Service' will connect everytime you start and create a new instance of itelf as part of the 'Per-User Services'... it assigns random string at the end of the service name (e.g. Connected Devices Platform User Service_b82c9). Something is wrong with it.

Immediately upon looking deeper at the service and the running tasks, details, etc... it was clear it was stuck in a re-starting mode, but wasn't doing anything. This service is used by Windows to manage connected devices and facilitate interactions between different applications and services on a network. That means pairing and communicating with smartphones, IoT devices, etc. This explains (in my case) why my Bluetooth mouse required I resort back to dongle and why the Windows Phone Link failed the moment Win 11 was introduced.

For me, this functionality wasn't as important as my clipboard, so I went into the details and changed its startup mode to disabled and rebooted. I still needed to disable the NVIDIA drivers for a clean re-boot, but I believe that's an epic battle between NVIDIA and Intel (630 UHD?).

Anyway, no more issues. It was happening to me most while in Visual Studio, or at least most noticeably, so I always attributed to VS and never joined the two; that was my first mistake. I didn't consider ALL of the ways I interact with VS, and now that I know more, I understand... I think.

I have a Logitech M720 Bluetooth. The roller has additional buttons (pushing the mouse left and right vs only down). The logitech software has the capacity to re-map the buttons on the mouse to be any keyboard combo you'd like. Given most of my time going to VS/VB6 (<= I know, I know), mine are mapped to F10/F11(F8/Shift+F8), or step-into and step-over. Apparently, this tool uses CDPService. Everytime I used it, I'd activate it, making the chances higher and higher for fail. Now that I've disabled the service, I've lost the handy little, 'step-over-with-mouse' feature, but I can copy from notepad to Excel...

I was hopeful this was an answer especially with your knowledge, BUT ALAS.

it is not, i still have a failing copy and paste function and i have left this service disabled for the best part of 2 weeks to make sure.

Wow, Glen!!

This worked- literally my PC become faster just due to you

All these days - its CLIPBOARD who's the culprit slowing down the machine,,

Thanks a lot

Cheers

Sethu