clipboard behavior

there's no doubt someplace this can be set, but i can't find it: just now i sought to copy some text from kmail to a libreoffice document. before the recent upgrade i would just select text in any application, pick a place in any other application, right click, and voila, it would be pasted. but no more.

i can of course do this among tde applications, but not going to or coming from other applications, such as firefox and libreoffice. i can still right click on the selection, choose copy, then go to the document i'm working on and select paste, and it works. but that interrupts the flow.

does anyone know what i need to do to restore the previous behavior?

thanks!