Clipboard Woes

[billroper]

So this old piece of code I'm maintaining calls OleSetClipboard and hangs. There's what I needed to make my day complete.

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

"OleSetClipboard, that OleSetClipboard,
It should do somethin', but won't do nothin',
It just keeps hangin', it keeps on hangin'
Around..."

At which point my techieness fails me. Anyone?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

All I can suggest is to zero all the structures you're passing in, and double-check the argument docs. Watch out for Microsoft's fav trick of setting the first element to the structure size (their weak-ass version of structure versioning) - sometimes there are structs inside the structs that only get referenced if other values happen to be thus and such - zero everything first.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Okay, well that's the middle eight...

"Zero structures as you pass,
Double-check argument docs en masse,
Watch for structs inside each struct
Or your code will hang and you'll be here all weekend..."

Should I shut up now?

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Oops, here it comes...

"The walls are sweatin', my eyes are strainin',
I'm sick and tired of code maintainin',
And OleSetClipboard, he just keeps hangin'
Around!"

Definitely shutting up now.

Olé!

[filker0.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I was programming Windows to any extent, so I can't really advise on your problem, however I recall trouble with Ole and the clipboard back in the bad old days of Windows NT 4.0. IIRC, you'd end up in a resource deadlock if you didn't clear out the clipboard before attempting to put something in it. The DDE <--> OLE stuff is now so muddled in my mind, and I don't recall whether there was some threading issue wrapped up with it as well.

I doubt that the above recollection is helpful, but I figure I'll give you something to investigate.

Re: Olé!

[filker0.livejournal.com]

As I sit and think about it, my recollection is that there's some connection with a callback method (IUnknown::AddRef, I think) that was the culprit... It's been too long, and my Win32+MFC quickref is very much out of date.

[billroper]

Song inspirations everywhere, eh? :)

[billroper]

I've tried stripping things out. The problem is that the entire debugging environment is hanging up underneath me, which is making this really intractable.

But thanks for the suggestions! I may yet figure this out...

Re: Olé!

[billroper]

I'm taking a look at the AddRef, but don't see anything yet. But, who knows?