Windows 10: Notepad no longer opens

Note pad does not open on my desktop but works ok on my laptop. On my desktop, when I click the Notepad icon only a thumbnail opens at bottom of my screen. The thumbnail is blank and doesn't do anything. Both my desktop and laptop have the latest Windows 10 OS. Any help would be appreciated.

:)

 

Windows 10 Character Map and Notepad


Well I found the answer to my question. I should have thought through this a little longer.

Notepad is native in ANSI mode.
However Wordpad can work in UTF-8 mode.
I found steps to make Notepad usable in UTF-8 mode but there are a lot of steps and once again there has to be a registry hack to make it work.
Now how do I make Workpad be listed in the most used application through the Start Menu?

 

Notepad

Hi,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community. Appreciate your interest in using Windows 10.

I suggest you to follow the steps provided below:

• Open Task Manager. Here’s a tip: press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.
• Click on Startup tab.
• Select Notepad from the list and click on Disable.

Hope the information is helpful. Feel free to write to us
for any other assistance with Windows, we’ll be glad to assist you.

 

Notepad consuming cpu 40%


Your screenshot of Task Manager and the notepad.exe properties shows the same size and creation date as in @dalchina's earlier screenshot. So it looks like it is the real notepad that's running.

But - it isn't running the way it should. In your Task Manager there should be a > to the left of notepad, and clicking on it should open up a list of the Notepad instances that are running, along with the name of the document that's open (or 'Untitled - Notepad' if none).

Yours doesn't show that (compare it with dalchina's screenshot). Notepad is running - yes, but not the way it's supposed to. It appears to be in the list of background processes, not in the list of Apps where it should be. Could something be trying to run it as a service? Perhaps some malware set this up, but failed to replace the genuine notepad.exe with its counterfeit one?

As a first step I'd look at the Startup tab in Task Manager for clues.