Shared Clipboard Copy/Paste Bug

[Gav80K]

For a few years I've been running Windows XP and Windows 7 x86 bit guest operating systems on a Windows 7 x64 host. I use these virtual machines for about eight hours per day and I do a lot of copying between them. A few times each day the shared clipboard stops working and I have to restart the machine to get it working again, but then it stops working again soon after. I regularly update VirtaulBox and Guest Essentials in the hopes that this bug has been fixed in the new version, but sadly the bug is still remains.

I did a search of the bug reports and there seem to be many reports of this issue, some as old as four years. Strangely, many of them have been closed even though the bug still exists. There seems to be quite a lot of threads on the forum about it as well, but none of them are particularly informative.

I just wanted to ask, is this acknowledged as a bug? It's strange that so many of the tickets have been closed, and with the bug persisting for so many years it doesn't look like there are any plans to fix it. Is it the problem that the developers can't find what's causing the bug or is it that they don't acknowledge its existence?

Also, is there any way to get the shared clipboard working without restarting the virtual machine? It's a bit of a pain to have to close everything and restart it again to get the shared clipboard working again.