That part you said "WHAT YOU NEED TO DO" is *exactly* what I said worked - and thought there had to be a better/simpler way to do.
Sorry about that, I did say I found your code confusing.

That is, manually passing events (especially keyboard events) from the menu to the appropriate widget seems silly to me. What I'm not getting is why I can't just reroute the events to the widget who cares (and already has a built-in method to handle).
I'm surprised its not "weird", or a "bug" :) Read Event handling overview. When the textctrl has focus, it handles Ctrl-V by itself through the default handler. When the textctrl doesn't have focus, it doesn't receive events. I don't think your approach would work on a wxwidgets level.

I say try the mailing list for more better help :)