I have a strange issue here that I cannot seem to get to the bottom of.

I have several Linux servers I use and my ssh client is PuTTY. I can copy and paste text from Linux Server1 to my Windows Desktop (Notepad) just fine. However, when I open up another PuTTY session with Linux Server2 and I try the same thing, same SSH client (PuTTY) and everything, I cannot. I try to paste, nothing. I'll go in and check but I'm pretty sure I can copy and paste within the terminal, just not externally.

Why might this be? Has anyone else seen behavior like this before? I double-checked the settings under PuTTY - window - selection and it is set to auto copy selected text to system keyboard and also all of the other settings are default (again it works in one session and not the other)

Many thanks for any advice you might have.

How do you paste? Note that Putty is a bit non-standard. For example, ctl-v doesn't paste by default (I don't know if the default can be changed).

Can you paste into the Linux Server 1 window?

Thanks a lot for your suggestion! I was highlighting in PuTTY and right-clicking on Windows to paste (which was the default setup). But I seem to have resolved it with a reinstallation. For anyone else with this issue, I have no idea what ended up causing it and after trying to figure it out again today I uninstalled and reinstalled on a whim. This fixed it for whatever reason. I don't know what version of PuTTY I had before but now I have 0.73 and it works fine. Now copy/paste works from all of my Linux servers to Windows. Weird.

The PuTTY Window -> Selection tab controls how copy/paste works. This can be set differently for each saved connection.

My guess would be that the odd one got tweaked somehow. An uninstall reinstall might have cleared all your connection settings. Did you have to reset each one up?
(I'm very careful to preserve those...I don't even recall the passwords to some of the servers I occasionally ssh to)

When I set up a new PuTTY installation, I typically edit and save the Default configuration so that every new connection I define works the same, and as I want it to.

I only had one saved server and Default and I checked back and forth between PuTTY and the Selection tab and both of those settings were on the default. It could very well be that I missed something, but I don't remember ever going in and changing any of it. In the future, thanks for the tip! and now that I have it installed fresh I will set it up the way I want to now and will import some saved connections.