on your Linux guests you could stop the "VBoxClient --clipboard" process and restart it (as your user in your X session) as "VBoxClient --clipboard --nodaemon". You can also spawn an extra one of these, if you have simultaneous X sessions in the guest and clipboard transfer works in one (usually the first one) but not the others. to debug, set the environment variables "VBOX_RELEASE_LOG_DEST=file=vbox.log" "VBOX_RELEASE_LOG=all.e.l.f" "VBOX_RELEASE_LOG_FLAGS='timeprog thread'" This will produce a similar log file called vbox.log for the guest in the current directory. When you are finished you can stop VBoxClient --clipboard again and restart it without the --nodaemon parameter, so that it goes back into the background.