Notepad 11.2402.22.0 Gone Wild

geeksalive said:

The new Windows Notepad 11.2402.22.0_x64 really seems to be a buggy mess.

The first weirdness that I noticed was the strange things it does with fonts, as I documented here:

Spellcheck in Notepad begins rolling out to Windows Insiders on Windows 11

But now I've run into a bigger problem.

My system restarted last night to install Windows updates, and when it can back up Notepad appeared to have opened every(?) file in my Music folder! I have no idea why. (They display as gibberish, of course.)

It also pegged one of my CPU hyperthreads at 100% utilization. (Fortunately, I have lots of cores and lots of RAM on this machine, so I'm not crippled by that.)

When I click on the "X" on a tab to close it, for most of the music files it takes from a minute to several minutes, and then finally closes it. Then I can try to close another.

But for some of the files it gets stuck. I click the X and it just sits there with the CPU thread pegged at 100%, indefinitely. I've let it run for a long time -- my guess is at least an hour -- and it never finishes.

Clicking the same X a second time just causes the tabs to disappear and the window title-bar caption to show "filename.mp3 - Notepad (Not Responding)".

I can kill it with Task Manager or Process Explorer, but when I restart it it reloads all the music files again, and I still can't close the ones which won't close without it getting stuck.

I went to settings and configured "When Notepad starts / Open a new window." Then I killed Notepad, and restarted it. But it did no good. It ignored the setting change and reopened the music files again.

I verified that the "When Notepad starts" setting is still set to "Open a new window," so that's not the problem.

I killed it again, and temporarily renamed my Music folder to Music.bak, to prevent it from reopening the files. Then I restarted Notepad.

No joy. It still reopened them all again!

That's how I discovered that it's using copies of the files which it had saved in an undocumented location. The only difference in behavior that I could see is that after I renamed Music to Music.bak it thinks that all the music files have been changed, so when I try to close one it asks if I wanted to save it.

Can someone tell me the best way to stop this thing from reloading those files?

I looked around in APPDATA, to find the temporary files that it's reloading, and I think I found them here:

C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\TabState\

There are a lot of files in that folder, in sets of three, named like this:

????????-????-????-????-????????????.bin (large)
????????-????-????-????-????????????.0.bin (20 bytes)
????????-????-????-????-????????????.1.bin (20 bytes)

Each of the large .bin files seems to correspond to one of my music files, but approximately doubled in size. When I inspect them I can see the corresponding music file paths embedded near the beginning, but spaced-out, as if each 8-bit byte has been converted to a 16-bit unicode word.

If I just delete the contents of that folder, will that get Notepad working again?

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