When you copy text from Writer, IBM Lotus Symphony, and possibly all other OOo
application, there is a delay if a clipboard viewer is running on the system
BEFORE you start any of the mentioned programs.

From the already running clipboard viewing application, it will receive the
message WM_DRAWCLIPBOARD without delay, but will block on GetClipboardData() for
the infamous 5 seconds, and then continue as normal.

This has been an issue for a very long time, as far back as OOo 2.2 or even longer.

Lots of accessibility programs like screen readers use a clipboard viewer to
read copied text. It is very irritating and frustrating for the users of such
programs.

There exists a simple workaround, but it's not very obvious.
1. Make sure no clipboard viewing program is running.
2. Open Writer, write some arbitrary text, copy it to clipboard (CTRL+C or
context menu).
3. Now you can run any clipboard viewing software without those nasty delays.

This is, in my opinion, an issue caused by broken clipboard viewer code within
OOo framework. It should, hopefully be easy to fix with these observations.

The workaround has been confirmed by others, at
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=29513&p=145174&hilit=clipboard#p145174

Why hasn't this been fixed yet? Related issues have been reported almost a
decade ago.