No...that's not it.

I can manually paste...and can paste special. I'm thinking it's something
to do with the code and how Powerpoint is treating the "shape". Not sure
what the code is to "pastespecial" in powerpoint. My "shape" looks more like
I would expect when I paste special in "Formatted Text (RTF)" but I'm not
sure of the Powerpoint code to perform this, and the macro recorder in 2003
doesn't help (there is no macro recorder in Powerpoint 2007!).

Maybe if I search/post over on the Powerpoint site I might get some insight?

Nicki