Hey jbacinti,

This does sound like it might be plugin related. Have you tried just enabling 1 plugin at a time to see if you can pinpoint what's causing the issue? You can find steps in this article.

You could also try Firefox Reset to see if that helps. It's like giving your install a big old dose of broad spectrum anti-biotics to cure most everything.

Hopefully this helps!

Matt,

I have not tried to enable them one at a time because when I disable all of them and then enable all of them, the problem is solved for a short while. Yesterday it was resolved for about 24 hours. I'll see hat happens tomorrow AM.

Does "Reset Firefox" remove the Add-ons or what?

Thanks,

jbacinti

Reset Firefox creates a new user settings folder (Firefox profile) and migrates part of your data. Your plugins don't go away, but your extensions do. The link in Matt_G's post has the details.

If you want to paste only the text and not the formatting of whatever you are copying from Firefox into Word 2003, it will always be fastest to use the Paste Special feature. This should be available on the right-click menu (or Edit>Paste Special), choose Unformatted Text or Unformatted Unicode Text.

I appreciate the above responses to try and help me resolve this problem. However I don't think I made myself completely clear when describing the problem. In short, I never had this issue in the past; it just started possibly on the last upgrade. I understand the suggestions above for not copying formatting, using Notepad, etc but I never had to do any of that in the past. I haven't added any add-ons although I'm not sure if maybe some of them updated with the upgrade to FF 15.0.1. Maybe someone at Mozilla could look into this for me.

Thanks,

jbacinti

Can you see any pattern to when this problem occurs? In particular, what kinds of content are affected? For example, in recent versions, there have been some changes to what Firefox places on the clipboard when you use right-click > Copy Image.

In Word, if you open the Paste Special dialog, which format has Word selected as the default?

If there is any pattern at all, it seems to be that once I restart FF in Safe Mode, shut it down and restart it, the problem goes away for 18 - 24 hours. I know; that seems real weird.

I don't recall that I have tried to "Copy Image" but I just tried it now and it works. But remember, I went through the above activities about 3 or 4 hours ago.

When I right-click in Word 2003 with data on the clipboard from FF, I do not get a "Paste Special" option. When I choose "Paste Special" from Edit, the default option with an image on the clipboard is HTML. It's the same when I've copied text to the clipboard.

I've never had to use "Paste Special" before. Now that means sometimes I have to clean up what I've pasted in Word for formatting, fonts, etc which is not a problem for me. Generally my copying and pasting from a browser is limited to recipes and other cooking related articles from a wide variety of web sites. Occasionally (this morning is a good example) I copy text from a forum I subscribe to and the Paste function on a new email using Windows Live Mail locked up the application.

My question about Paste Special was not to propose doing that from now on, but just to understand whether something peculiar is happening with the clipboard formats.

I copy text from a forum I subscribe to and the Paste function on a new email using Windows Live Mail locked up the application.

This was pasting from one page in Firefox to another page in Firefox?

Next time you are going to paste from that forum, after selecting, could you right-click, choose View Selection Source, and copy the selected HTML source to a text document (such as Notepad) first? Then if there is a problem we will have some insight into what was in the copied code. (To share that, you could try using the site http://pastebin.com/ since pasting HTML code here makes a mess.)

"I copy text from a forum I subscribe to and the Paste function on a new email using Windows Live Mail locked up the application."

This is copying from a page in FF to a New email document from Windows Live Mail, part of the Windows Live Suite not a FF page.

Here's a sample of what I get copying from the forum:

<font class="mediumtxt">“Bewildered and lost without his teleprompter, President Obama flailed all around the debate stage last night. He was stuttering, nervous and
petulant. It was like he had been called in front of the principal after goofing around for four years and blowing off all his homework”<br>
- Charles Hurt, Washington Times<br>
<br>
"I don't know what he was doing out there. He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it. Romney, on the other hand, came
in with a campaign. He had a plan, he was going to dominate the time, he was going to be aggressive, he was going to push the moderator around, which
he did effectively, he was going to relish the evening, enjoying it."<br>
- Chris Matthews, MSNBC<br>
 <br>
President Obama argued that government plays an essential part in economic growth, while Mitt Romney contended it should get out of the way.<br>
- NYT<br>
</font>

PS: It has been about 24 hours since I've had the issue but have stopped and restarted FF several times for different reasons. I'll post later if the problem returns.

Thanks,

jbacinti

Has anyone had a chance to look at the above data? I still have the problem.

Additional info: I can go to the same website using IE, do a "copy" and "paste" into Word or WLM with no problem.

Thanks,

jbacinti

I was hoping someone who actually used Windows Live Mail would chime in, but perhaps they are fewer and further between than expected.

What happens if you do a two-step copy paste using Word as an intermediary? Word interprets HTML differently than both IE and Firefox, so I don't know whether this will cleanse whatever is choking WLM.

(1) Paste into a blank Word document
(2) Select all (e.g., Ctrl+a) then copy
(3) Paste into Windows Live Mail

The problem is that I cannot "paste" into Word, Notepad or WLM after "copying" from a page displayed in FF. I even tried to paste into Open Org and got the same response, lockup.

There is something out of kilter with FF on this particular PC as I have another using FF, same version and no problem.

On the bottom of FF here I have the add-on tool bar. On the right-hand corner I have the FF orange and blue logo. When I hover the pointer over it I get a dialog box that offers 3 options. They are "left-click, switch rendering engine of current page"; "middle-click, use new tab to switch rendering engine" and "right-click, show IE tab, 2 sites filter". I have no idea what these mean or where they came from. Not sure if this is the cause of my issue but worth posting for help.

Did you try to use Edit > Paste Special in Word?

Word may not work properly with the content that Firefox places on the clipboard.

Sorry, for some reason I thought you could paste into Word.

You mentioned that copy/paste works for a time if you open Firefox in Safe Mode, then close it, then re-launch normally. I can't think of anything Safe Mode does that would persist during your next session, but perhaps this indicates that one of your extensions is the culprit.

The icon and menu you describe sounds like one of the IE Tab extensions. I don't know whether that has any effect on copy/paste.

Why not try disabling all nonessential extensions on the following tab. (All extensions that you can tolerate using the web without.)

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Add-ons > Extensions category

Any improvement after restarting Firefox?

This may be a bigger problem than just pasting into word. I am having problems copying from the Google Translate site, which just began tonight. One other person also had that problem, though he thinks he has it fixed. However, I think his is only a temporary fix, because his fix did not work for me. Please see this thread for more information:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/940871

Hi thebigchief, I think that's probably a different issue, since forums probably do not use code from Google Translate (unless they've integrated it somehow).

cor-el,

Edit Paste Special worked. However, I never had to do that in the past.

jbacinti

jscher2000,

Disabling several Add-ons corrected the problem, but remember, starting FF in Safe Mode did the same thing for a short period of time. I'll keep checking for a day or two and then begin the process of Enabling them one at a time to see if indeed one of the Add-ons is a problem.

Thanks,

jbacinti

This is likely a problem with the various content formats that Firefox places on the clipboard and that may vary with what and from where you copy content to the clipboard.
We've seen more of such issues with the clipboard and MS programs like Works in the past and the advice was to use paste special to make it work.

cor-el,

I understand that changes are needed to keep FF meaningful as well as useful. That doesn't explain why I can start FF in Safe Mode, fix the problem but only temporarily. Why wold the "Copy" function not work copying data from FF but work copying the same data using IE?

Yes, since yesterday I have to use MS Internet Explorer instead of Firefox 16.0.2 version, which is useless for me N O W , no cut and paste function of p u r e text anymore. Read the huge amount of failure items in newsgroup on the latest FIREFOX failure.

Or I go back to FF V 16.0.1 instead ?

VERY VERY ANNOYING.

regards df5sx