Really weird computer problem involving cutting & pasting from Remote Desktop & local applications

Factual Questions
1

This is a really weird problem, it’s been driving me nuts, and I can’t figure it out so I’m turning to you all.

In the course of my work, I do a lot of work via remote desktop.

I often have to copy & paste things from that computer to my local one. For example, I might want to copy & paste a column of numbers from a document I’m looking at on the remote machine into my local copy of Excel.

For a long time - years - this worked just fine.

Lately, I’m starting to get weird characters when I do the copy & paste. For example, I just tried to copy a line that reads “Total: $297.14”

What I get is a string of question marks or other weird things. I’m thinking they’re unicode characters of some sort.

This morning, I was working along just fine, cutting & pasting away for a couple hours. Then all of a sudden BAM! I start to get Unicode characters.

Nothing changed. I didn’t log in and out of the remote machine. I was going from a browser to Excel.

What the heck is going on? This is getting REALLY annoying.

2

I don’t know but I’ve had similar problems. It seems to be application specific for me. The workaround I found was to do the copy then paste it into a notepad on the remote machine. Then, copy that and paste the result onto my local machine.

I’m guessing that there are some sort of embedded control characters that are getting messed up in the transfer between the machines and by converting everything to plain text (which is what happens when you paste into notepad) strips them off.

Of course, if you need the control characters for things like formatting or whatnot then this won’t work but it might help.