So I'm making a very small program for personal use in tkinter, and I've run into a really strange wall. I'm mixing tkinter with the pywin32 bindings because I really hate everything to do with the syntax and naming conventions of pywin32, and it feels like tkinter gets more done with far less code. The strangeness is happening in the transition between the pywin32 clipboard watching and my program's reaction to it in tkinter. My window and all its controls are being handled in tkinter. The pywin32 bindings are doing clipboard watching and clipboard access when the clipboard changes. From what I've gathered about the way the clipboard watching pieces of pywin32 work, you can make it work with anything you want as long as you provide pywin32 with the hwnd value of your window. I'm doing that part, and it works when the program first starts. It just doesn't seem to work when the clipboard changes. When the program launches, it grabs the clipboard and puts it into the search box and edit box just fine. When the clipboard is modified, the event I want to fire off is firing off...except that event that totally worked before when the program launched is now causing a weird hang instead of doing what it's supposed to do. I can print the clipboard contents to stdout all I want if the clipboard changes, but not put that same data into a tkinter widget. It only hangs like that if it starts to interact with any of my tkinter widgets after being fired off by a clipboard change notification. It feels like there's some pywin32 etiquette I've missed in adapting the clipboard-watching sample code I was using over to my tkinter-using program. Tkinter apparently doesn't like to produce stack traces or error messages, and I can't really even begin to know what to look for trying to debug it with pdb. Here's the code: #coding: utf-8 #Clipboard watching cribbed from ## {{{ http://code.activestate.com/recipes/355593/ (r1) import pdb from Tkinter import * import win32clipboard import win32api import win32gui import win32con import win32clipboard def force_unicode(object, encoding="utf-8"): if isinstance(object, basestring) and not isinstance(object, unicode): object = unicode(object, encoding) return object class Application(Frame): def __init__(self, master=None): self.master = master Frame.__init__(self, master) self.pack() self.createWidgets() self.hwnd = self.winfo_id() self.nextWnd = None self.first = True self.oldWndProc = win32gui.SetWindowLong(self.hwnd, win32con.GWL_WNDPROC, self.MyWndProc) try: self.nextWnd = win32clipboard.SetClipboardViewer(self.hwnd) except win32api.error: if win32api.GetLastError () == 0: # information that there is no other window in chain pass else: raise self.update_search_box() self.word_search() def word_search(self): #pdb.set_trace() term = self.searchbox.get() self.resultsbox.insert(END, term) def update_search_box(self): clipboardtext = "" if win32clipboard.IsClipboardFormatAvailable(win32clipboard.CF_TEXT): win32clipboard.OpenClipboard() clipboardtext = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData() win32clipboard.CloseClipboard() if clipboardtext != "": self.searchbox.delete(0,END) clipboardtext = force_unicode(clipboardtext) self.searchbox.insert(0, clipboardtext) def createWidgets(self): self.button = Button(self) self.button["text"] = "Search" self.button["command"] = self.word_search self.searchbox = Entry(self) self.resultsbox = Text(self) #Pack everything down here for "easy" layout changes later self.searchbox.pack() self.button.pack() self.resultsbox.pack() def MyWndProc (self, hWnd, msg, wParam, lParam): if msg == win32con.WM_CHANGECBCHAIN: self.OnChangeCBChain(msg, wParam, lParam) elif msg == win32con.WM_DRAWCLIPBOARD: self.OnDrawClipboard(msg, wParam, lParam) # Restore the old WndProc. Notice the use of win32api # instead of win32gui here. This is to avoid an error due to # not passing a callable object. if msg == win32con.WM_DESTROY: if self.nextWnd: win32clipboard.ChangeClipboardChain (self.hwnd, self.nextWnd) else: win32clipboard.ChangeClipboardChain (self.hwnd, 0) win32api.SetWindowLong(self.hwnd, win32con.GWL_WNDPROC, self.oldWndProc) # Pass all messages (in this case, yours may be different) on # to the original WndProc return win32gui.CallWindowProc(self.oldWndProc, hWnd, msg, wParam, lParam) def OnChangeCBChain (self, msg, wParam, lParam): if self.nextWnd == wParam: # repair the chain self.nextWnd = lParam if self.nextWnd: # pass the message to the next window in chain win32api.SendMessage (self.nextWnd, msg, wParam, lParam) def OnDrawClipboard (self, msg, wParam, lParam): if self.first: self.first = False else: #print "changed" self.word_search() #self.word_search() if self.nextWnd: # pass the message to the next window in chain win32api.SendMessage(self.nextWnd, msg, wParam, lParam) if __name__ == "__main__": root = Tk() app = Application(master=root) app.mainloop() root.destroy()