Pidgin Copy/Paste Problem

Revisiting an addiction of mine, free software, I experienced another pidgin rarity recently. Copy/Paste stopped working. It used to be fine--did I upgrade? Did I catch a virus? Did I exceed my mailbox capacity to store spam? Did Jesus come back in EMP glory and cook the circuitry in my hard drive? So many questions, so many opinion-spouting pundits, so few answers.

So, like I was starting to say... when I would try to copy/paste from a pidgin chat window, it would fail. I guess there are numerous circumstances that can lead to this, but apparently no one had vocalized about mine.

After much sleuthing, cursing, and the procuring of a voodoo doll I seem to have at least affected a solution that resolved my problem--even if I don't completely understand why; a facet of "modern" "computer" "science" (which somehow seems less like science and more like over-eating and watching commercials on FCC censored cable TV that I'm paying for--where did America begin to go wrong?)

The symptom:
Pidgin doesn't copy to the Windows buffer as evidenced by nothing getting pasted into my document when I attempted to, ...er paste.

The investigation/technological prayer ritual:
If you open Help -> Debug Window from Pidgin you may see errors involving the clip board. In my case opening services.msc revealed that ClipBook was not running. When I'd try to start it I was getting "Could not start the ClipBook service on Local Computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start." This appears to have been caused by either (or both) Network DDE and Network DDE DSDM both being set to disabled. By changing them to "automatic" suddenly the Pidgin copy/paste operation began to work for me.

Now, let me say, I don't know if ClipBook actually has anything to do with this, or whether enabling Network DDE, Network DDE DSDM, or both where the real problem. Maddeningly I wasn't able to repeat the instructions in reverse to confirm which service was the culprit, but again, this is what frustrates me about CS decades into this experience.

For those of you that used to be able to fix your car without an expensive scanner, and a recurring service contract with a multi-national perhaps you'll better understand my experience, and mental disposition--or as I call it dispossession.

Again, in other words. After getting pidgin to copy paste, no combination of turning off, disabling, or quirking of eyebrows seemed to be able to get it to stop working again. So, if you were looking for free satisfaction, well, perhaps you'll experience it by repeating my steps, and perhaps you wont.

Either way, have a better day!