Comment 7 for bug 445084

This behaviour must be inherent in some other GUI library, because it's not apparent in the gnome-terminal code.

I use the highlight copy/paste buffer so extensively that this is a very serious usability issue for me. I finally got fed up and installed konsole. While it did install some 191MB of KDE libraries, I'm quite happy with the end result. konsole has a very similar feature-set (tabs, etc) and tons of configuration options like gnome-terminal.

For anybody else that wants to use konsole as a workaround for this bug:

sudo apt-get install konsole

I also put a launcher icon in my to panel pointing to /usr/bin/konsole.