Windows 8 opens notepad on boot- no startup entry found

07
2014-07
  • Zach

    I just upgraded from windows 7 to windows 8 and everything is working fine except notepad keeps opening on boot with a "access denied" window that comes up as well. I've ran MBAM and removed some junk, I've disabled every "file not found" item in autoruns as well as something that had a text/xml title in it and I've ran CCleaner a few times. Nothing is working, any help is much appreciated!

    • Answers
  • Zach

    It was the desktop.ini file in the startup folder- deleting that cleared it up


    • Related Question

    Uninstall Notepad on Windows XP
  • Mark Roddy

    How do I uninstall the Notepad application from a Windows XP Professional system?

    It clearly is not listed in the 'Add or Remove Programs' applet from the control panel. I have also checked the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' applet from the previously mentioned screen, but the program is not listed. Is there a way to uninstall this application from a machine?


    • Related Answers
  • xxl3ww

    Windows automatically restores notepad if you copy over it or delete it.

    One possibility is

    1) Change Explorer view options to show system files

    2) Delete Notepad.exe from:

    • C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
    • C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache
    • C:\WINDOWS\system32
    • C:\WINDOWS

    3) Now you'll need to stop the file being copied again by excluding it from the restore\filelist.xml.

    attrib -s -h -r %windir%\system32\restore\filelist.xml

    edit the file %windir%\system32\restore\filelist.xml

    now add the following lines to the excludes node of filelist.xml

    <REC>%windir%\system32\notepad.exe</REC>
<REC>%windir%\notepad.exe</REC>

    change the attributes back to hidden and read only.

    attrib +r +h %windir%\system32\restore\filelist.xml
  • Frank V

    You can't. It is a core program. If you really don't want it to exist, you could delete the .exe

  • Chris Thompson

    You can actually REPLACE notepad.exe with another editor if that's what you want. You have to make sure to remove ALL copies of notepad.exe on the drive (such as the DLLCACHE) then replace the file. Windows will tell you about the problem but you can tell it to ignore and keep the file. I've done that before with editor2.exe.

  • Travis

    I've actually replaced Notepad on my machine with AkelPad.

    The installation asks if you want to use it as your text editor. It renames itself notepad in place of the real one and somehow disables/out-smarts the protection Windows put on it as a core program.

    You may be able to search for some documentation on how they achieved this.