It Just Stopped Working

Don't you hate it when something that used to work, just stops working?

I've been draggin-n-droppin images into WordPerfect for quite sometime. Yesterday, drag-n-drop stopped working. Instead of the image being placed in the doc, I would get a generic placeholder with the name of the file.

This reminded me of the old WP10 issue covered in this forum post on WordPerfect Universe:

WP9,10: Cannot insert graphics files on Win2k, WinXP systems

But I wasn't getting the "Detected file format not supported" error message. I tried the old indexing hack, but it didn't seem to work.

So, I investigated further. Turns out that the same problem occurred when I tried to drag-n-drop into Word!

Then I came across this post:

Copy and Paste from Explorer yields an Icon Thumbnail vs picture

This seemed closer to my problem and I found that if I RIGHT-clicked and then dragged I could get a pop-up window that gave me the choice of inserting. Picking that worked. But LEFT-clicking and dragging still does not work.

So perhaps Windows OLE (object linking and embedding) is out of whack. But what could throw it out of whack and what could whack it back in?

This whole process took up hours of my day yesterday and today--all to get back to where I was originally. And I still don't have a full answer.

Of course, WordPerfect's tech support was useless. The only semi-answers I found were on a third-party bulletin board. WP doesn't even have true forums. They only supply a Usenet-style feed and it's not searchable!

Man!

I remember the days when WP was the gold standard for tech support. Anyone -- even someone with an unregistered copy -- could phone their toll-free line and get excellent, knowledgeable support.

Man!

Those were the days!

Then Novell bought WP and busted it up a little. Then Corel bought it and busted it up some more. Now I remain loyal to it in order to retain a few features that M$ Word doesn't have, but issues like this drag-n-drop thing are severely testing me.