With the growth of using virtual machines as development environments, thanks to great projects like Vagrant and Puphpet.com, I have been using virtual environments for most of my development these days.  On some occasions, because I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system on my development laptop, I have the need for a Windows environment in order to work with certain clients. (Sad, I know.)
Well, while using these Windows environments it is a royal pain if I cannot copy and paste back and forth between the host and virtual machine.  So I have always resorted to installing the Guest Additions (I use VirtualBox) to make this possible.  However, recently this stopped working for some reason.  I honestly didn’t have the time to investigate so just overlooked it and kept going. (I honestly don’t use a gui very often within a vm.)
Today I finally got tired of looking the other way and investigated why I couldn’t copy/paste between host and vm.
The Fix
Turns out there is a very easy solution.  I guess at some point the copy/paste functionality setting is turned off by default.  So I simply needed to click on the VirtualBox “Devices” menu drill into the “Shared Clipboard” submenu and then select the option I desired.
Now things are working as I expected.