I often take a screengrab and then flick to Xara to paste the image in, dissect it, and produce instructions for customers.

I'm working in Windows XP Professional, though the problem I'm about to describe plagued me when I used Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows 98 Second Edition.

I obtain my screenshot by pressing the "Print Screen" button on my keyboard (or ALT+Print Screen for a shot of a particular window), then open Xara and press CTRL+V

Most of the time (over 90%), the paste works fine and I'm asked if I want to paste it as an unformatted bitmap etc (to which I always answer with the default option).

Sometimes it's as if I never did the screenshot, and the old contents of the clipboard are pasted in again. This happens especially when I have already taken a screenshot. However, when this happens, I have confirmed that the new screenshot is in fact on the clipboard because I can paste it into Word or WindowsXP's Paint application.

There's nothing I can find which triggers this. Some days I can take 20 shots with no problems, others I get stalled on my 2nd. Pasting into Paint and then copying back to te clipboard doesn't help, my only work-around is to save the shot from Paint, then import the file into Xara (which always works).

I've tried to narrow down when this happens over the last two years, but I have had no luck - there's no one application which is always loaded on a failure day.

I virtually always have Dreamweaver 4.01, Outlook 2002/XP SP1, CuteFTP Pro 2.0 and MYOB Plus v10 running, along with a handful of Internet Explorer windows open.

I'm running a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512MB RAM and a Matrox G400 graphics card (latest drivers), have all of teh Windows XP updates installed, and have experienced the same problem like I said for 2 years+, so I'm sure that it's not a hardware or OS problem because my PC has been through many incarnations in that time and the problem has always been there.

I'm using Xara X v1.0d CD (dated May 18th 2001, it must be preparing for it's 1st birthday party. Will someone join me in prayer that Xara may bless us with a new version at Internet World 2002 at Earls Court in June (http://www.internetworld.co.uk/londo.../index.cfm#X)?)

Does anyone else suffer from the same problem, or have a workaround?

Daniel
www.digitalred.com