Yes, we do have some plans to do a clean up of some known clipboard issues. If you happen to be communicating with any Opera employees the ID for this task is DSK-346999 or you can look out for it in future changelogs.

Fixed in the latest Opera Next snapshot
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/01/27/smarter-address-suggestions

Opera Next are our development builds. They install alongside stable Opera (currently at version 11.61) and use their own unique profile. This is intentional because we don't want the development version corrupting the profile of the stable version should it contain any bugs. Also changes to the way we store the profile in the Next version often mean that you cannot always downgrade back to stable anyway.

If you want your settings from Opera 11.60 in Opera Next 12.00-1256 you have two options. Either use Opera Link to sync bookmarks, speed dials, typed history, etc. or if you need absolutely everything from your stable profile you can copy it over from its currently location to where Opera Next expects to find it. Opera Stable stores its profile in "~/.opera" and Opera Next stores its profile in "~/.opera-next". Hence this could be achieved by doing the following on the command line (neither Opera Stable, nor Opera Next should be running at the time):

cp -R ~/.opera ~/.opera-next

Once done, install Opera Next and it should find this copy of the profile.

P.S. When testing to see that the reported issues are gone, do not have Opera 11.61 running (just Opera Next) or you may still have issues copying between the host and guest of the Virtual Machine.

When Opera 12.00 is released as final/stable it will have this fix. If for some reason we decide to do an interim release (e.g. 11.62) I'll suggest to management that we backport this fix (no promises but I can push for it). That should mean that either way the next stable version of Opera that is released should have the fix included.