Excel freezes when copying / cutting to paste elsewhere

I have had a similar problem on a new, plenty-fast i7 machine. Even with a trivial spreadsheet with half a dozen cells and one formula, Ctrl-C would freeze Excel for 20-30 seconds. I, however, would always get control back after that time. Turned out to be something to do with default printer. My default was a network printer that was offline. When I went to control panel and changed my default printer to CutePDF writer or something like that, copies became instantaneous as they should be.

Go to File \ Options. Select the "Advanced" tab. Go to the "Cut, copy, and paste" section. Uncheck "Show Paste Options button when content is pasted" and "Show Insert Options buttons"

I had this problem on a worksheet with no macros - it turned out to be conditional formatting. When I removed the conditional formatting from the whole worksheet all was working again. Then I added it back.