For quite some time, I’ve been experiencing issues with the Brave browser freezing, becoming unresponsive, or suddenly losing Copy/Paste functionality throughout Windows as a whole and resulting in error messages such as:

After some investigation, I traced the problem back to Oracle’s VirtualBox. While I’m a big fan of VirtualBox, it appears to be the source of my headaches. When VirtualBox isn’t running, these issues don’t occur; but once it starts, the problematic behaviors sometimes happen in Windows and Brave, though not consistently.

Before anyone suggests checking the clipboard settings in VirtualBox, I’m fully aware of those and have tested all configurations to no avail. So, this isn’t a simple settings problem.

What drives me crazy is the inconsistency. Sometimes Brave freezes; other times, it runs smoothly. Copy/Paste sometimes fails; other times, it works perfectly. Some users mention that disabling hardware acceleration helps, but that hasn’t made a difference in my case.

I’ve found discussions about similar Brave and VirtualBox conflicts, so I know I’m not alone, but a definitive solution still eludes me.