The Clipboard is cleared when opening a Contact

When you open a Contact form, all data on the clipboard is cleared. If you look at the Office clipboard, you might see some icons in the clipboard, ahead of the text you copied.

This is caused by add-ins which add icons to your toolbars. When the contact form loads, the addin pastes an icon to the tools it adds. The icon replaces your text on the clipboard and since it’s not text, it can’t be pasted into most fields.

You have two choices:

Uninstall or disable the add-in
Open the contact first (Shift+Ctrl+C) then copy the text and paste

How do you know which add-in causes it? Look at the icons in the Office Clipboard, then disable the add-ins that use those icons and test it.

The following add-ins are known to cause this problem:

MapPoint’s Outlook add-in (some versions)
Stamps.com’s Outlook integration
Aladdins Envelopes and Labels Version 6 (latest)
Norton Internet Security Professional
Pando Antivirus
Adobe Contribute Plugin

To disable add-ins, open Outlook's Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options dialog then click the COM add-ins button.

Developer Information

If you are developing an add-in and need to add your icon to the toolbar button, you can avoid this problem by saving the contents of the clipboard before pasting their buttons, then restoring the contents after clearing your buttons from the clipboard.

If the add-in is for Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003 only, you can set the CommandBarButton.Picture property directly to an instance of the IPicture object bypassing the clipboard. If you need need to support older versions, use an if… then.. else… statement to determine the version and method.

If you need help using these methods, visit the forums at OutlookCode.com, our own Outlook Forums, or the Outlook programming forum at MSDN