I'm using an application (Linn Kinsky) that has a button to copy text to the clipboard. The copy operation was failing when any web browser was running, but was succeeding when no browser was running. As I nearly always have a browser open, the failure was occurring at least 99.9% of the time.
After a very protracted and painful debugging process, I discovered that the Kinsky application had been marked as "Deny" in the Webroot Protected Applications section, with no notification to me that this had happened. This meant that my attempts to use this application to copy to the clipboard were failing, with no indication why this was happening.
My debugging steps have included contacting the authors of the Kinsky application to ask for their help, spending hours doing Google searches to try to find any relevant information, updating the .NET framework, upgrading Firefox (my main browser), disabling and deleting a number of Firefox plugins, starting Firefox in safe mode, starting Windows in diagnostic mode (which apparently doesn't prevent Webroot from starting), uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, and downloading and installing a selection of clipboard manager programs to try to figure out what was going on.
All this work and a large amount of frustration could have been avoided if Webroot had displayed a pop-up telling me that the attempts to access the clipboard were being blocked because of my Protected Applications settings. It would surely not be difficult for the Webroot developers to add this.
I hope this post will help other people who are experiencing a similar problem, and I hope the Webroot developers will add a suitable warning pop-up in a future release of the software.
Best answer by MikeR
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