Illustrator paste CS3 bug

Today I had to help someone who couldn’t paste anything into Illustrator CS3 on a Mac. You could copy any picture from many programs fine, but whenever you selected/used the keystrokes for paste, the picture or object still wouldn’t appear.

After enough Googling, I found the following answer, which worked wonderfully (paraphrased from http://forums.adobe.com/thread/317769):

• Open an Illustrator file or create a new one
• Put an object on the page (any object, a square, a circle, you name it), then drag that object to the desktop to create a .pictclipping file. (You can then ignore this .pictclipping file, trash it, or do whatever you would like with it.)
• Now it is possible to copy and paste to Illustrator. It doesn’t like the default new office fonts, gradient fills or shadows, but it comes over as vector.
• The gradient fills and shadows paste in as raster objects. I just define a plain fill and get rid of the shadow before I copy. Change the font to Arial or something and it comes in fine also.

This may have to be done after every restart, but quitting AI doesn’t seem to affect the temporary fix.