When I have directory opus running while using Microsoft Excel, I get frequent "Cannot open the Clipboard" errors when attempting to copy cells to the clipboard in Microsoft Excel. As soon as I exit OPUS, these failures stop and I have no difficulty copying cells to the clipboard in Excel. If I re-run OPUS, they start occurring again.
Any ideas? My Excel is a locally installed copy of "Microsoft Office 365 Business" and Version 16.0.6001.1038.
When searching for "Excel lock clipboard", there are plenty of hits, so i would suspect that Excel or some other function used within Excel tend to have some issues.
"The OpenClipboard function enables you to lock the Clipboard so that no other processes can modify its contents as you are attempting to access that data."
social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forum ... m=exceldev
But in that case, Explorer should have the same problem.
This appears to a bug in Excel which can be triggered by almost any programs (or, more likely, combination of programs) which monitor the clipboard. If you search for Excel "Cannot open the Clipboard" you'll find lots of people talking about it in different places, and lots of suggests about how restarting Excel or closing other Office apps, rdpclip.exe, starting or stopping various services, pushing Esc before copying the cell, and closing a long list of 3rd party apps, etc. can cure or trigger the problem.
(The threads where the message is "Cannot empty the Clipboard" are likely to be the same issue, and also worth trying. The Google search seems to net both at once as it seems to know they're related by people discussing both within pages about either.)
I lost count of how many apps were said to be involved by different people but they can't all be badly written. The common factor is always Excel, and it sounds like it is opening, modifying, and closing the clipboard, then trying to do the same again immediately and giving up with an error message if it doesn't work the first time. It should either be doing everything in a single open/modify/close operation, only closing the clipboard when it is finished, or it should have a retry/wait loop the second time it tries to open the clipboard because it should know it is going to be busy.
It's completely expected that the clipboard will become busy for a split second or so after modifying it, since modifying the clipboard causes things which monitor the clipboard to open and look at it for a split second. Apparently, if that split second lasts slightly too long, Excel starts to fail.
It's likely you could also fix the problem by closing something other than Opus which is also monitoring the clipboard, since each program monitoring the clipboard has to wait in turn for any others, like a queue, and the issue will be the total length of the queue (and that Excel doesn't wait, or doesn't wait long enough).
One thing to try in Opus is resetting to the factory default toolbars (backing up your current toolbars first if applicable). It's possible that certain custom toolbar entries could cause Opus to take much longer than normal when evaluating a clipboard change. If that works, we can look at your custom toolbars and work out what was in them which was causing it, but the toolbars may turn out to be unrelated.
Excel or other office Add-Ins can also cause problems with the clipboard. Disabling them is also worth a try.
These were among the first few search results for me, and they contain or link to lots of things which are worth trying:
[ul][li]TechSupportForum: "Cannon Open The Clipboard" error in Excel[/li]
[li]IHaveAPC: How To Remove “Cannot Open The Clipboard” Error In Excel 2010 (if you do have VNC or similar running, it may make more sense to prevent it running automatically and only launch it when needed, rather than to keep killing it as this one suggests; it's also likely not really to blame, and just making the queue slightly longer, the same as Opus)[/li]
[li]Microsoft Answers: Stop error message 'Cannot empty clipboard' (empting the temp folder, removing the Skype add-in for IE, and various other suggestions)[/li]
[li]Superuser: “Cannot Empty the Clipboard” in Excel 2007 (lots of suggestions, and links to more)[/li][/ul]