Jim,
Rich reported that copying in one instance of Chirp and pasting in another doesn't work. I tested this myself...
Linux: - can open two instances of chirpw - copy/paste works between instances
Mac OS X: - won't allow opening two instances - succeeded in opening two different versions of Chirp - copy/paste works between two different-version instances
Windows: - installed version won't allow opening two instances - standalone version allows multiple instances - copy/paste doesn't work between instances
So we can deduce Rich must be using the standalone version on Windows.
The next question is why copy/paste doesn't work between instances on the standalone Windows version. I looked at which clipboard Chirp uses and it's one built into X. My guess is that PyGTK emulates this on Windows instead of using the OS clipboard.
The first of these two patches changes the clipboard target to the normal OS clipboard. Can you test this on Windows? I don't have a Windows dev environment set up.
The second patch is another attempt to solve the same problem. It stores the clipboard data outside the app. This feature exists so that the clipboard data can remain available after the source app is closed, but my thought is it might solve the cross-instance paste issue. Can you test this patch separately from the first one?
Tom