Quick question - Notepad on W10 will only run minimised - X-post

[David]

Subject says it all. I can start Notepad and it appears in the task bar but it won't display on the screen. No idea if this is a recent W10 "feature". Initial searches not helping.

Cheers

Dave R

[Andy Burns]

make sure the "invisible" notepad is selected in the taskbar, press alt-space and then choose either restore or maximize from the menu that should pop-up

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Why would you want an invisible notepad to start with? Brian

[Paul]

You could try Task Manager - Processes_Tab - click the instance line for it - Maximize.

That's to prove it actually has a corresponding window.

Don't ask me what to do next :-)

I'm just trying to do something simple, to prove there isn't a more serious problem.

*******

Right now on 21H1, I can see that some incoming patch, is patching Notepad. Again, a state of flux exists. Is it installed, that patch ? Or not ? Have you rebooted lately and given the stupid thing a chance to finish whatever mess it got itself into ?

If the machine had been turned off for a while, that might have just arrived. This is a file which lists every file included in the KB5005033.

Notepad.exe 10.0.19041.1081 218624 bytes

*******

My notepad is functional. This is what Spy++ shows.

Under the green "Code" button here, is a "Download ZIP" option. The ZIP I got, has a "spy14.00.25420" folder in it. The "spyxx_amd64.exe" is for an x64 OS. The "spyxx.exe" is for a x86 (32bit) OS.

If you run that on Win7 or Win8, you'll need "two clumps of DLLs". Since we're discussing Win10 right now, I won't go into the misery of satisfying the extra passengers that need to be thrown into the folder. Suffice to say, some of the daily utilities we use, like Firefox, actually have one of the clumps of DLLs installed with them. The other bunch is a Visual Studio runtime (the files all have the same name but are different versions, the most recent versions contain multiple versions of files).

In Win10, "spyxx_amd64.exe" should "just work". Double-click.

In any case, you have two things. You have the Task Manager knob, to try to get the window to appear. And running the "spyxx_amd64.exe" by double-clicking, compare to my [working] Notepad example, and see if there really is a window listed for it. If your entry doesn't match mine, that would be a bad sign. And you can't really make a program do the right thing -- you could try elevating Notepad, which Notepad does not mind. But things like session number protection (where a program is in a different "session" than the display manager), you can be blocked then, from opening windows, which would be an excellent reason for a window to be absent. You would think any decent application would just exit, if denied access to the display.

Paul

[Another Dave]

And this simpler than Linux? ;-(

Another Dave

[Another Dave]

And this is simpler than Linux? ;-(

Another Dave