Well for me, the good news is I only needed the copy to clipboard routine for testing purposes. It added about 23K to the clipboard, over about 1200 loops. For testing, inserting a delay, and it worked just fine.
I have used exit loops before, to identify when a webpage has been crawled and saved, etc. That's a nice idea using INSTR() for the clipboard, but it requires a known terminator. Now in your example, you could have alternately used RIGHT$(_CLIPBOARD$, 7). Another method would be to test the LEN(_CLIPBOARD$) and when it's equal to the oldclipboard% + LEN(whatsbeignadded) then EXIT DO.
Neat stuff to discuss, but this 4000+ line piece of crap I'm writing now isn't going to finish itself. Hey, maybe by V1.5 it could???
Pete