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Okay, here is the issue, I am not familiar with Win 7, so this one has me confused. A friend of a friend just bought a new computer...and I got a call today that she is unable to copy and paste text out of websites in IE8...the menu pops up when she highlights the text, but no options for copy show up at all. She is frustrated as she used to do this in her old XP compy before it died and wants me to fix this for her.

Hrm, make sure she's right-clicking inside the highlighted text, rather than left-or-right clicking on the little blue "social networking" icon that pops up to the left of the highlighted text.

Okay, well I will check that when I go over there to take a look at it tomorrow. I just want to make sure that it isn't a strange bug or software issue. She said she was clicking on the highlighted text..but that may or may not be true, I need to see what is happening as it is hard to fix problems over the phone with someone with zero computer experience.

I haven't seen that particular issue, but add-ins can mess with the context menus, so it's possible she has one installed that has mucked up the existing copy and paste. You can try running IE in no add-ons mode (that link is old but I think it's the same in IE8/Win7). If that works, you could also try selectively disabling whatever add-ins she has installed to try to isolate the bad one. A lot of users install toolbars and other dreck (sometimes unintentionally) and this is sometimes the result -- with context menu items to do everything from translating the text into other languages to blasting it to every social network under the sun, but not the mundane functionality you actually use/need.

I think it may be possible to control copy/paste in IE (and elsewhere) via Group Policies (IIRC) but it seems unlikely that would be the case here.

Of course another solution would be moving her to one of alternatives to IE -- I believe right-click copy/paste works fine in Chrome, FF, and Opera.

Another thought might be - is she trying to copy/paste from an Acrobat doc inside IE8, possibly? You need to select the "text selection" tool to do that.

Yeah, I am leaning towards a FF install...not a big fan of IE. But keep the answers coming..want as much info to try on this problem.

To be fair, IE is a lot better than it used to be. And it does a good job of keeping itself updated with a minimum of fuss (Chrome will too, but it requires you to keep their service running). And for a lot of naive users, having an up-to-date IE is probably better than an out-of-date FF.

Mentawl wrote:

Another thought might be - is she trying to copy/paste from an Acrobat doc inside IE8, possibly? You need to select the "text selection" tool to do that.

That's an interesting point. I always forget about that because I set the Reader to always open in its own process/window, rather than rendering inside the browser. It's always been far more reliable that way. (Of course I'd rather use another PDF reader altogether, but that's not always possible).

Well got it all sorted out, just ran a repair on IE and that seemed to fix the issue. If only everything was so easy to fix with computers, she is happily cutting and pasting again.

I use Firefox myself, but I've heard that IE is a lot less buggy than it used to me. I'm amazed that something as simple as copy and paste could get screwed up with a random add-on. Wow.