Weird trouble pasting objects in Illustrator

[Marco]

anyone?

[Lriv]

create a new layer and have it active/unlocked before attempting to paste your image…your image will pasted into this layer.

[Jeff Kelley]

Exactly! Just read what you wrote. You are attempting to paste an object into a locked layer. You should be able to unlock the layer and then paste it into the layer. If you don’t know how to unlock a layer, best of luck to you.

[Marco]

Nope, that’s where it becomes weird.
I copy from the layer 1 then trying to paste into the layer 2 and AI paste into the layer 1. To avoid this what I’ve tried is to lock the layer 1 to force AI to paste into the layer 2 and then I get that msg.
That’s weird because on another computer I do the same thing and it works. I can copy / lock and then paste into a different layer without any problem. Or I can copy from one layer and paste into another one.

[Jeff Kelley]

As long as you sure the layers are not hidden or locked, it sounds like somethings messed up with your Illustrator. I’d dump the preferences and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the app.

[Marco]

It worked!
Thanks for helping …
After having deleted the preferences AI started to work fine 🙂

[Heather Memmel]

I have found that every once in a while you just need to re-install Illustrator. It just seems to freak out for no reason at random times. Reinstalling always fixes the bugs.

[Franz Härtl]

I know this is age old, and it’s more than pathetic that this is still an issue TEN FREAKING YEARS after the initial question was asked. I had exactly the same problem though: Illustrator CC trying to paste to seemingly random layers, even if they were locked. Even more weird, upon pasting AI inserted stuff from the pasted layer into seemingly random sublayers of the layer it insisted on pasting to. It drove me nuts, and I was about to reinstall as was suggested here.
I came across the “solution” (or rather the cause) of the problem recently. I post it here, because this thread is still one of the top results if you google the problem.

As often is the case with Adobe it is a well meant but horribly implemented feature, not a bug.
The problem arises when “preserve layer order upon pasting” is active (it is deactivated by default, which is probably why reinstalling appears to fix the issue). To really fix AI you have two options:
1. deactivate “preserve layers when pasting” in the layers context menue (the one in the top right corner of your layers-area). You then have to live with AI messing up your sublayers by moving everything to the top layer. In case you don’t use complex sublayer setups or get used to using groups instead this might be a simple solution.
2. make sure that the layer you try to paste (i.e. the source) has a different NAME than ANY of the layers in the file you try to paste to (i.e. the target). If you do that AI adds the pasted layer with preserved layer-order as a new layer.