Hi Dan, I think this is an old bug that isn't due to the search but the plugin not liking pasting from openoffice. I reported it here
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1278/pasting-characters-into-the-openoffice-plugin/#Item_1

and refered to it again here
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2431/paste-in-prefix-field-in-word-causes-crash/#Item_8

So it's definitely reproducible.
To answer one of your questions: actually I can paste from Wordpad no problem into either the search or the suffix / prefix fields. It's only if I've copied from OO that it hangs and you have to kill it from the taksmanager.
Windows XP, OpenOffice 2.4 Zotero 1.04
I'll try it on Linux to see if I can reproduce it there too.
Regards, Jon.

Thanks, Jon—knew I'd seen this before, but couldn't find the thread.

A couple more questions:

1) Does this happen if you paste text from OpenOffice into the search field in the main Zotero pane rather than the Add Citation window?

2) Does it happen if you paste text from OpenOffice into another app while the Add Citation window is open?

The only thing I can think of here is that, when the Add Citation window is open, OpenOffice is blocked, and pasting text copied from OO triggers some interaction with OO, which crashes it.

I don't really know much about how the clipboard service works on Windows, but I wouldn't think any additional interaction with OO would be necessary after the text was copied to the clipboard, since you can paste from apps that have already been closed...

tried to paste into Wordpad with the Add Citation window open and OO hanged

OK. Can you see if this is reproducible with other modal windows in OO, such as in the Print window?

not sure if I quite understood what you were after here

The point is to see if you can paste text copied from OO when other modal (blocking) windows are open in OO. We've already determined that pasting from OO is necessary, that the application you paste to does not matter, and that this happens only when OO is blocked due to the Add Citation window. But it'd be helpful to know if this also happens when you try to paste from OO when another modal window (such as the Print window) is open. You can paste wherever you want, since the paste target doesn't make a difference—you just have to be pasting text copied from OO.

OK, for some reason I'm now able to reproduce this in both OpenOffice and Word. Here's what seems to be happening:

Apps on Windows (or at least these two) appear to need to perform some operation when text copied from them is pasted, and until that action occurs, the target application hangs. I don't know why any such action would be necessary, since you can of course paste text copied from a program even if the program has been closed (and even paste text from those apps into the citation window just fine if they've been closed and reopened since the copy), but this appears to be some fluke of the clipboard system on Windows.

You can reproduce the hang copying text from OO/Word into another application while the Zotero citation window is open—the other application will hang until you close the citation window, at which point the text will be pasted. So when you paste into the citation window itself (which belongs to Firefox), OO/Word can't perform its requisite action, which hangs Firefox, which means that OO/Word is permanently hung, because it can't continue until the citation window is closed. So it's a deadlock.

You could try raising this on the OO forums and point to this thread in the hope that someone will see it who knows more about how the clipboard works on Windows, but there doesn't seem to be much we can do about this.

One simple workaround is to copy text into an open Notepad window and then recopy it from there before copying into the citation window. You might also look for some program that converts rich text on the clipboard to plain text (like Plain Clip on OS X), since that might remove any link back to OO and solve the problem.

The latest conclusion is that the problem is with Zotero; in particular an unreturned RPC call.

Well, the problem is still as I describe above, but we're going to try to switch to asynchronous HTTP calls from the plugins to avoid blocking the thread and allow Word and OpenOffice on Windows to complete the paste (for whatever reason they're implemented that way). This will probably require something like a "Waiting for Zotero..." dialog box in Word/OOo that closes automatically when the operation completes. Ticket created.

So, what's the status on the ticket? (Either that or let me move the window....yeah, I know....)

This doesn't occur in the new Python plugins (for OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Mac Word 2008, and eventually Mac Word 2004). It's not fixed for Windows Word (VBA) users, but in the next Zotero releases you'll be able to switch to using a real (movable) window on Windows using the integration.realWindow hidden pref. The downside is that it may appear behind Word, but if your screen is big enough that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

We still might be able to fix this for the VBA plugin.

I agree with Phil Gons here:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5899/cant-paste-text-into-editor-in-word/

Word keeps freezing on me because of this very reason.

Dan,

Is there any current progress on this for the VBA plugins yet?