Clipboard history is not working

1. It was never switched on

The most common one by a distance. Clipboard history is off until somebody turns it on, and turning it on does not recover anything copied before that moment.

Press Win V. If a Turn on button appears, that was it. The long way is Settings › System › Clipboard › Clipboard history.

2. A policy has disabled it

On a work or school PC the switch can be greyed out, or it flips back on its own. That is an administrator’s policy, applied deliberately, usually because a clipboard history is a written record of everything anybody copied on a machine that handles other people’s data.

It is not a bug and it is not something to work around quietly — if you need it, ask your IT team. They may have a good reason, and they may simply not have thought about it.

3. The Clipboard User Service has stopped

Windows runs a per-user service that does the actual remembering. When it stops, copy and paste still work but the panel stays empty.

1. Sign out of Windows and sign back in. This restarts the service and fixes it most of the time.
2. If that does not do it, restart the PC properly — Restart, not Shut down, because fast startup can carry the broken state across.

4. Something else is taking the shortcut

Win V has to reach Windows to do anything. It will not if:

• You are focused on a remote desktop or virtual machine window that is capturing Windows-key shortcuts — the far machine gets the keystroke, not yours.
• A game, a remote-support tool or a macro utility has grabbed the combination.
• Windows-key shortcuts are turned off in the keyboard or gaming settings.

Click on the desktop first and try again. If it works there, the shortcut is being taken by whatever had focus before.

5. Windows will not keep that kind of item

Clipboard history holds text, HTML and bitmap images, up to 4 MB per item. Copy a file, a folder, or a 12 MB screenshot and nothing appears in the panel — not because it failed, but because that item was never eligible.

Copies that a password manager marks as secret are also skipped on purpose, by Windows and by every well-behaved clipboard tool. That one is a feature.

The one that is not a fault: it empties every restart

Microsoft documents this plainly — the history is cleared each time the PC restarts, and only pinned items survive. People lose work to this every day, because nothing warns you.

Two ways out. Pin anything you will want tomorrow, one item at a time, from the small menu on each entry. Or keep the things you reach for somewhere built to hold them.

If you are tired of checking

Every cause above comes from the same design: clipboard history is a background list, switched on somewhere in Settings, emptied on a schedule you did not choose.

ClipTen is not a list. You put a copy on a key yourself — Ctrl C 1 — and it is on that key until you replace it, through restarts, sign-outs and shutdowns, because slots are encrypted on disk rather than held by a service that can stop. Pasting is Ctrl V 1, with no panel to open and nothing to be empty.

It does not replace Win V and it does not switch it off. It just means the four things you actually need are never the ones that went missing. More on how the two work together →

Last checked September 2026.