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General discussion

notepad stopped working

Mar 13, 2004 7:49AM PST

After removing some rather insidious spyware, I've found that notepad has lost most of it's functionality. I can directly open notepad, as well as from a shortcut, but I cannot set the file type to automatically do so.I had to reassociate all .txt files to open with wordpad, but this isn't my prefered editor. .ini, .nfo, and other .cfg files that notepad could handle are a pain to open now as well.
Right clicking a file and selecting the open with option will not bring up notepad, even if I browse to notepad.exe and select "always use this program". Also the right click create a new text file option has gone too.
I've copied over another notepad file from my other computer but this didn't do any thing as notepad itself seems unaffected. Restoring to a previous restore point didn't work either. This computer is running WinXP Pro SP1
Any clues as to how to restore the full functionality to notepad? I'm currently preparing to re-install windows as a possibly drastic solution (it just doesn't seem the best course of action for a minor problem).

Discussion is locked

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Re:notepad stopped working
Mar 13, 2004 8:07AM PST

Do a search and see if you have two notepad.exe files? You should have at different locations. If so, get rid of the bad and copy the good to replace it perhaps.

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Re:notepad stopped working... fixed.
Mar 13, 2004 8:28AM PST

So 5 minutes after posting this message, I found that notepad.exe had moved from the system32 location to the windows folder. Simply moving it back and re-associating with the tools ->folder options ->filetypes dialog fixed it. Now i just have to recreate the option to right click new text file. thanks for anyone who took the time to read this anyways.