.NET Clipboard Problems Under VirtualPC
When performing Clipboard operations (SetDataObject, SetImage, etc.) in a .NET program under VPC, you may encounter the error "Requested clipboard operation did not succeed." This error turns out to be a major pain if you are doing dev. in a VPC like mine, because 99% of your calls will fail. Every once and a while, you'll get lucky and one will go through (it seems to work if you go to another application, cut some text, paste that text, then come back and use the clipboard in your .NET app).
There are a few approaches to fixing this issue:
1) Retry your operation. In fact, this scenario is common enough that Microsoft included with the 2.0 framework an overload of SetObjectData that accepts retry counts and delay counts. However, this is not gaurenteed to work.
http://dedjo.blogspot.com/2007/10/clipboard-setdata-getdata-troubles-with.html
2) Create another thread, set it's apartment to STAThread (since clipboard operations require STAThread) and execute your clipboard actions there. http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/mglaser/archive/2006/11/06/Using-CopySourceAsHTML-in-a-Windows-2003-VPC-environment.aspx
3) Kill and disable the VPC service responsible for clipboard sharing. You will lose some OS integration, but it will fix the problem when the above fail.
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/10/31/disabling-folder-sharing-clipboard-integration-etc-under-virtual-pc.aspx