As far as I can tell, copying and cutting in LabVIEW place the object copied or cut onto two separate clip-boards. If you then paste the object back into the SAME LabVIEW process, you use LabVIEW's clip-board and it pastes the object. If you instead past the object into ANYTHING ELSE, like a second LabVIEW process (different version, etc.) it pastes off of the system clip-board and pastes an image of the object. It also works this way if you have something on the clip-board and crash LabVIEW. When you reopen LabVIEW, you can only paste an image, not the objects, since it is a different LabVIEW process.
By the way, this is one way to really mess with your co-workers: paste some code images onto the diagram and ask for help debugging!
Bob