Copy in Affinity products induces system-wide polling, flashing windows

[Eddie Kominek]

1. What Application are you using? Any of the three.
2. Are you using the latest release version? Yes
3. Can you reproduce it?  Typically starts when I copy an item or layer.
4. Does it happen for a new document? If not can you upload a document that shows the problem?  Doesn't seem document dependent.
5. If you cannot provide a sample document then please give an accurate description of the problem for example it should include most of the following:

•    What is your operating system and version Windows 11, patched up to date.
•    Is hardware acceleration (in Preferences > Performance) ON or OFF ? On and no.
•    What happened for you (and what you expected to happen):
  • When copying something or a layer, my system will begin polling whatever window I have selected every 1 second.  It will focus/defocus every second.  So if I open a menu, the menu will immediately close like I've defocused the window and clicked off the menu.  I have to be lightning fast to open and click something on a right-click menu or dropdown.  I can go to other windows, like Firefox, and it will focus/defocus the entire window, clearly visible with the address bar highlighting/un-highlighting over and over.  This bug affects my entire OS, every open window.  If I never fire up an Affinity program, my system will never display this bug.  Even if I close all Affinity programs, the polling persists.  I CAN go into task manager and through trial and error, found that if I kill COM_SURROGATE, it will stop the polling.  I can reopen an Affinity program or if I've left one open, the issue will resume.  If all Affinity program as closed when I killed the process, it will not resume.  I was having to restart windows to clear the problem until I found the COM_SURROGATE process kill option. 
•    Provide a recipe for creating the problem (step-by-step what you did). See above, just a copy action is enough to trigger the issue on my system.
•    Screenshots (very handy) or a screen capture/video. I can OBS my desktop if you'd like, but you're just going to see flashing windows.
•    Any unusual hardware (like tablets or external monitors or drives that may affect things) or relevant other applications like font managers or display managers.
•    Did this same thing used to work and if so have you changed anything recently? (software or hardware): Started after upgrading to 2.x

[Rick G]

That is known to make a mess on some machines. Check this out

https://www.google.com/search?q=COM_SURROGAT&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[Callum]

Hi Eddie Kominek,

This is the first time I have seen an issue like this reported. Do you have any 3rd party clipboard managers etc installed? If you haven't already please could you try reinstalling the app?

Thanks
C