Wow sounds like a nightmare! Although I certainly have many muscle-memory-scripted tasks that I run like that :) On OSX command-shift-v is paste-without-formatting and seems to be fairly universal - I guess there's not a Windows equivalent? I thought that I recalled ctrl-shift-v working in most contexts on Linux to remove formatting as well but I've been using OSX for too long now and don't remember.
Same shortcut is convention in Windows, but it takes only one program you use regularly to not respect that to make you learn an alternative workflow, and then stick to it everywhere.
