From: "Gary Britt" 

Some of these programs, like clipcache plus and other good clipboard
utilities have a delay that can be adjusted that delays the time before
they grab a copy of the clip.  MS Office's internal clipbook doesn't like
it apparently if the clip gets copied too quickly by anything other than
it. Probably the kind of problem you had with Excel.  Anyway, the latest
version of ClipCache Plus (circa 2000, I believe) plays just fine on Win2K
and MS Office 2000, no network DDE clipbook service running.  Couldn't
comment on XP and later versions of MS Office.

After trying numerous such utilities recently.  ClipCache, is absolutely
stable for me, and my favorite so far.  I would certainly agree with anyone
who duped it if it affected stability for them.  The couple others that I
thought were half way decent are Hamsin Clipboard, freeware, and M8 or
sometimes known as ClipM8 (from a UK company also).  ClipM8 has a pretty
decent interface, previews bitmaps/graphics files as well as text/rtf, etc.
and comes in a decent freeware version with a more complicated more
featured pay version (but the freeware version really has about everything
anyone would need it isn't severely crippled), but M8 had two drawbacks for
me, (i) I prefer the Clipcache Plus interface a bit more (not a lot but a
bit more) and (ii) on older hardware (i.e., 466 mhz Celeron with 512k
memory) ClipM8 sucked up 22% of my CPU time, which made a noticeable slow
down in cursor responsiveness in my other apps, (that meant ClipM8 had to
go).  I emailed the company about my experience, and they emailed me back
and said that it was a known problem with older hardware.  On newer 1.5 ghz
and higher machines they said it wouldn't use more than 1 or 2 % of CPU
time. Clipcache Plus and Hamlin use virtually no cpu time (which seems to
me is the way it should be).  I found Hamlin had to be restarted now and
then as it would lose track of its clipboard contact now and then.  This is
apparently a problem all these utilities have to deal with for some reason
(MS Office Clipbook?).  Clipcache Plus does a much better job of keeping
its hook alive in the chain of clips from the clipboard, and conveniently
has a command that you can use to tell it to reconnect if it should get
confused (which hasn't happened to me but nice that the command is there).

Hamlin is pretty good on features and configurable hotkeys which is an
absolute must, but it has no preview feature at all.  I found a freeware
program called Clipboard Viewer that loads fast (unlike the windows
clipbook) and can be used along with Hamlin to get the preview feature,
kind of kludged up in a way but works.

I'd give an honorable mention to a freeware utility called Clipboard Buddy.
It has a nice modern XP like interface, is simple to use, but lacks a few
handy features like merge clips and sequential pasting of clips.  It also
doesn't let you reconfigure the built in hotkeys or turn off those hotkeys,
which is a huge no no for any utility freak like me (who runs with numerous
hotkeys already built into my fingers for numerous other programs).

Clipmate 6 has all the features and then some, but is so busy and
complicated that it isn't intuitive to use for just the few features most
people would want.  It lasted about 5 minutes before it was uninstalled.  I
don't have time to study manuals for little utility programs that should be
simple and intuitive to use the most needed features.

Cheers,

Gary

"Frank Haber"  wrote in message
news:40d59461$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> I found both ClipMate and ClipCache (?not plus) made things significantly
more
> unstable under 98.  I haven't tried them under 2k or XP - gunshy, I guess.
> Luckily, some programs have an internal clipboard stack, and that
partially
> compensates.  In fact, I remember conflicts between clip utils and Excel,
for
> instance.
>

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