I don’t know what happened, but now MS Word is having a funky problem. Ok, so it’s not a big problem, but I would like to know how to fix it. Here’s what’s happening:
Whenever I have some text copied to the clipboard before Word is open, then I open Word and paste it, the only thing that gets pasted is this icon:
If I have Word open, then copy some text, then paste it, it works fine.
Anyone have any ideas on what’s going on?
Thanks
Daniel
It sounds like you’ve got some sort of clipboard “manager” running that’s perverting your data… Windows and Word usually agree on transferring and properly presenting clipboard data.
Check your startup folder / system tray / task manager to see what else is running. Kill some unneccessary / unknown tasks and repeat the copy / paste exercise.
If you can’t fix it I’d recommend you reboot, reformat, and install Linux. 
Yeah I found that I cant copy then open winword because nothing would paste at all. While its open and then copy it, it pastes fine.
Which version of word? Is it only word that does this? ie, if you copy text from Firefox and try pasting it to wordpad, does it work?
A friend at work was whinging about Excel doing weird things with stuff on the clipboard; randomly removing things for no good reason. Maybe it’s not just Word but the whole Office malarkey…
Maybe it’s nature’s way of saying OpenOffice.org.
Phil
Ok, I’ve reinstalled Office and uninstalled a few suspicious programs and I still have the problem. It’s not only copying from IE that causes it. I just tried opening word, typing something, closing word (and not saving), reopening word, and then pasting and it still pastes the question icon.
It seems I can paste into excel, frontpage, and powerpoint with no problems.
Short of ditching MS, what else can I try?
Daniel
Have you searched the MSDN Knowledge Base?
It’s an encyclopedia of Microsoft’s endless lines of bu!!sh!t. Search on error codes, product names, bug descriptions, etc… you can learn a lot from reading a few KB articles!