Copy to clipboard from Firefox does not work with Synergy run in service mode on Windows 7 x64

Question

For reference, I run a Synergy 1.4.2 server on Windows 7 x64 with one CentOS 5.5 Linux client. Most mouse and keyboard functions work exactly as expected. The following is an exception.

Copy & paste from server -> client fails under certain conditions. All text copies done on the Linux client seem to work (I can paste text into Windows). The reverse is not quite true. When running Synergy as a user with Admin privileges, text copies on the Windows 7 x64 server appear to work from all programs (I can successfully paste the copied text on either machine). When running Synergy as a service (started from services.msc), text copies on the Windows 7 x64 server appear to work from all program except Firefox. Specifically, in service mode, when I highlight text in Firefox and do any of (a) Edit -> Copy, (b) right-click -> Copy, or (c) Control-C, I CAN paste the text into any other program on the Windows 7 server but cannot paste this text onto the Linux client. This only occurs with Firefox.

As a workaround (still in service mode), I often open a text document in Notepad. I copy text from Firefox and successfully paste it into Notepad. I can then copy the text from Notepad and successfully paste it on the Linux client. Again, other programs besides Firefox do not exhibit this behavior (I.e., I can copy/paste from Google Chrome without issue). And again, this issue only occurs when the Windows 7 x64 Synergy server is started in service mode.

Has anyone else experienced this same phenomenon? Any and all comments or suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

I have also experienced this problem just recently with a new Windows 7 machine. In my case the Linux machine is the server and Windows 7 (and XP) are clients. I can copy and paste between XP and Linux in either direction without problems, and copying from Linux to paste into Windows 7 also works. But I am unable to copy from Windows 7. I did have a look at the debug messages but nothing stood out, other than seeing no clipboard messages at all when moving out of the Windows 7 screen.

To me it seems that the Synergy service is unable to read the clipboard, probably as part of Windows 7's updated security model.

I think I can confidently say this is a bug in Synergy, but hopefully it's one that's easy to fix! (I guess I will have a go myself if it gets annoying enough...)

Answer 2

I seem to have the same problem and I found it annoying enough to spend time to debug and fix it (for me).

The symptom is that seemingly all non-plain-text entries in the clipboard are ignored. This can be nicely verified by opening MS Word and the clipboard view, since entries there have little icons identifying the format of the entry.

According to the code that should not be a problem since each entry has several formats and always plain text UTF-16 encoded, which is what Synergy expects.

Unfortunately Synergy tries to enumerate all available entry formats via EnumClipboardFormats, which should also be no problem, but somehow it is. I wrote a simple test program and there was no problem with that approach. In Synergy EnumClipboardFormats returns only the first format which is CF_UNICODETEXT for plain text and something completely different for everything else. Instead of returning the other formats, as my test program, in Synergy the next call to EnumClipboardFormats returns error 183 (ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS) which makes no sense and is not documented.

Replacing CMSWindosClipboard::get with the method below did fix the problem for me.

CString
CMSWindowsClipboard::get(EFormat format) const
{
IMSWindowsClipboardConverter* converter = NULL;
for (ConverterList::const_iterator index = m_converters.begin();
                        index != m_converters.end(); ++index) {
    converter = *index;
    if (converter->getFormat() == format) {
        HANDLE win32Data = GetClipboardData(converter->getWin32Format());
        if (win32Data != NULL) 
            return converter->toIClipboard(win32Data);
    }
}

return CString();
}