There has been a recent change in select.el/get-selection that results in cut and paste not working anymore under win32. The symptoms are as follow. The form (get-selection 'CLIPBOARD) is always returning nil. However, (get-selection 'CLIPBOARD 'STRING) is returning what is expected. So it is pretty clear that this part of the code for get-selection is wrong: ;; The source app didn't offer us anything compatible in TARGETS, ;; or they're not negotiating at all. (That is, we're probably not ;; on X11.) Try to convert to the types specified by our caller, ;; and throw an error if the last one of those fails. (while data-type (condition-case err (progn (setq res (get-selection-internal type (car data-type))) (throw 'converted res)) (selection-conversion-error (if (cdr data-type) (setq data-type (pop data-type)) (signal (car err) (cdr err)))))))) The fact is that get-selection-internal seems to return nil, not to trigger an error. Moreover, data-type is supposed to be a list at this point and it won't stay a list after the (setq data-type (pop data-type)) . So I can offer this patch but possibly there are best ways to fix that: C:\Source\XEmTeX\xemacs>diff -u -b \mirror\xemtex\xemacs\xemacs-21.5\lisp\select .el "\Program Files\XEmacs\xemacs-21.5\lisp\select.el" --- \mirror\xemtex\xemacs\xemacs-21.5\lisp\select.el 2005-03-09 22:58:34.0000 00000 +0100 +++ \Program Files\XEmacs\xemacs-21.5\lisp\select.el 2005-03-10 22:33:53.0000 00000 +0100 ＠＠ -146,10 +146,12 ＠＠ (condition-case err (progn (setq res (get-selection-internal type (car data-type))) - (throw 'converted res)) + (if res (throw 'converted res) + (signal 'selection-conversion-error nil) + )) (selection-conversion-error (if (cdr data-type) - (setq data-type (pop data-type)) + (setq data-type (cdr data-type)) (signal (car err) (cdr err)))))))) (get-selection-internal type data-type))) Moreover, I don't know much about this stuff, but win32 doesn't seem to take advantage of the TARGETS tag, which would certainly make much more sense. Opinions on how to do that? Best, -- Fabrice Popineau ------------------------ e-mail: Fabrice.Popineau(a)supelec.fr | The difference between theory voice-mail: +33 (0) 387764715 | and practice, is that surface-mail: Supelec, 2 rue E. Belin, | theoretically, F-57070 Metz | there is no difference !