Windows Media Player 11 Interferes With Clipboard Notification
Jul 16th, 2007 by admin
Update: Thanks to Jeremy, for letting us know about the fix available from Microsoft.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/941282
Background: One of our users was having frequent clipboard disconnects. When asked to narrow it down, he found that every time he ran Windows Media Player 11, the clipboard connection dropped. Upon investigation, it seems that Windows Media Player 11 will distrupt the clipboard connection 100% of the time!
Tested: Windows Media Player 11.0.5721.5145 on XP
Problem: Running Windows Media Player (WMPlayer) 11 causes dropped clipboard connection
Test: You can demonstrate the same behavior with the regular XP clipboard viewer:
1) Close all programs, including WMPlayer.
2) Run the XP clipboard viewer: Start | Run | Clipbrd.Exe (if not installed, install it with add/remove windows components, in control panel).
3) Copy this line from your web browser, it should show up in the clipboard viewer.
TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST
4) Start Windows Media Player 11
5) Copy THIS LINE from the web browser. It should show up in the clipboard.
ANOTER TEST ANOTHER TEST ANOTHER TEST
If line 5 didn’t show up in the clipboard, but line 3 did, then WMPlayer is clearly interfering with the clipboard connection.
Oh boy, it’s even better. After shutting WMPlayer down, the clipboard notification chain is still busted. They have a SERIOUS problem here.
I suspect that they are registering as a clipboard viewer, but are failing to pass along the WM_DrawClipboard messages to the next viewer. Full information on how to do this correctly is documented on our clipboard viewer page.
I can’t replicate this problem.
XP.SP2 - Fresh install a week ago with all updates.
WMP11.0.5721.5145
I followed your instrucions 1-5 (the only odity was I got an error message bacause the Clipbook Service was disabled but it still showed the “TEST TEST TEST” in the local clipboard) and the error you described did not occur.
The reason I was looking into this is I have - for a long time - been getting seemingly random clipboard errors, such as “Cannot Open Clipboard” This has followed me around through re-installs of XP and it still even happens with Vista.
I haven’t looked too hard for a solution yet, but today one of my users stared getting a similar problem, so now I really do want to find out what is screwing with my clipboard.
Is there any tools of strategy I can use to find the root cause of these problems?
Thanks,
Jon
FIX: An application does not receive clipboard viewer messages if Windows Media Player 11 is running, or Windows Media Player 11 does not share .dvr-ms files
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941282