Excel... "the clipboard cannot be emptied" - a solution

I say "a solution" advisedly: Excel warns that another application may be using the clipboard - thereby preventing it being cleared (because e.g. the other application has "locked" the clipbaord.) But even if it were true, how does one identify the offending app? The hard way... quitting them one by one and seeing when the fault goes away. As a result of which I found an offender: the Skype add-on for Firefox - and whilst other applications have also been noted as being at fault, the only one I had previously noted was rther more obscure than Skype.

I had tried all sorts of cleverness (such as adding DWORD AcbPreventPreemptiveCollect = 1 to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\General; checking that rdpclip wasn't running; worrying about the VM integration features of Windows 7's XP Mode, etc.), none of which worked, and then for some reason just thought I'd be methodical with the only other major app that was running - FireFox.

I restarted it in safe mode and the Excel error (which actually only affected Drag and Drop, rather than cut and paste per se) disappeared. I then went through the Add-ons disabling all and re-enabling one by one until the culprit was found. To be honest, I had expected the Adobe Reader plug in to be at fault, but it wasn't.

Hope that helps lots of people with various clipboard problems in various versions of Excel and various Microsoft operating systems.

Vista SP1 - BSOD, Bugs and Aggravations Part Deux

Does your system seem sluggish? Do you have one of those dashboard gadgets that says how much memory you are using and its seems to be saying "A Lot!"?

Or more specifically, have you checked the Processes tab of the Task Manager and seen row after row of taskeng.exe processes... tens? Hundreds? Thousands?

It pays to check occasionally. I only had a few hundred taskeng.exe processes, but that's more than enough to say WTF!

Quick Summary...

Taskeng.exe is the process that shows up for tasks created by the Task Scheduler. In Task Scheduler you can see which process belongs to which task by showing the Preview Pane and selecting a task event on the History tab and looking at the info on the General tab just below, where you will see something like

Task Scheduler launch task "\Start AVG Control Centre" , instance "C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG7\avgcc.exe" with process ID 2424.

But, if you have the particular problem of taskeng overload you won't find any corresponding tasks or events unless you select "Show Hidden Tasks" from the View menu... and then voila!

What you should probably be looking for is a task in Task Scheduler Local Library called "User_Feed_Synchonization... This task takes care of RSS feed collection, so if you don't use RSS feeds at all you will probably never have this problem, but if you do, look at its History... lots of failures? Yep, "UFS" is spawning another instance of itself every 5 minutes by default, and if they don't also terminate automatically that's an accumulation of 288 a day, each consuming a bit less than 1MB. Leave your machine on for a few days without restarting and >95% of the processes will be doing nothing helpful at all.

To resolve the problem - which is that the task has been corrupted - delete all existing "User_Feed_Synchronization..." tasks and then open a Cmd window.

Type "MSFEEDSSYNC DISABLE" (belt and braces approach) and then "MSFEEDSSYNC ENABLE", which will create a new feed collection task. The default task runs Once at 01:45 and then every 5 minutes until the next midnight... and then every five minutes thereafter so feeds won't be collected until either 01:45 or you kick start the task...

But at least you will own (a bit more of) your PC again

More info on checking the RSS User_Feed_Synchronization task, registry entries etc. from a Cmd window can be found on the Microsoft RSS blog, and my thanks to the guys, especially Andrew208, in the Technet forum who initially sorted this out in the post Re: Solved: 1055 spawned taskeng.exe threads... WTF? It seems this is an SP1 RC1 bug that didn't get stomped properly.

One of the few occasions on which one finds a problem and almost immediately a full answer... Nice Stuff.

Vista SP1 - BSOD, Bugs and Aggravations

I'm fed up with this particularly useless piece of "assistance" from Microsoft. Nice idea the "Problem and Solution Centre", especially since this Vista HP laptop is BSOD'ing every day now, so I thought I'd check to see what it had to say about the current state of my somewhat poorly system...

Aha! Let's follow that link and follow those obviously helpful steps...


What driver? Which device? How about a link to the Knowledgebase?

I have lost count of the times I have clicked the "No" brackets- this-was-not-helpful-at-all-quite-the-reverse-thank-you-very-much- if-you-want-to-add-my-blood-pressure-to-the-list-of-problems-now- close-brackets button and conveyed my displeasure (in decreasingly moderate terms of course) in response to the helpful question "Was this information helpful?", so maybe, just maybe, a little humiliation is in order.

Yes, it's in order - but whether it will help or not is another issue.

(BTW, the laptop manufacturer reliably informs me that the BIOS does not need to be updated and rather wished that MS would stop suggesting this as it creates an inordinate amount of completely unnecessary work for them...)

And, just to round things off, in case you are ever worried about whether your Drivers are properly signed and aren't entirely certain, please be aware that neither is Vista, so don't expect much help there either...

So, as you can see snapman.sys (of which there is only one on the system) is both signed and not signed... maybe Acronis signed for the fact that they weren't signing it? Who knows, but I see the imprimatur of MS behind it all.

By the way... the BSOD's are all 0x9F "DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE" errors and I suspect MS again with regard to the USB drivers: instead of just dying some 10-20 minutes after plugging in my Lexar JumpDrive Lightning II drive when I plugged it in today Vista refused to acknowledge the existence of the device at all then crashed when I took the non-existent device out again...

Of course everything was just dandy before SP1... but, 'tis true - plus ca change...

As as I saw in a forum sig recently "The mouse has been moved - please restart your system to apply the new settings"...

Annoying Stuff