Yeah, as the title suggests, I'm having trouble with notepad.exe constantly reinventing itself.... no matter how many times I end the process in Taskmanager/Taskkill in CMD as administrator. I no sooner end it and it is back pretty much instantly. When this happens the CPU is running at over 90%, often at full tilt, 100%. Not only that, it is writing files that I cannot find. So far it has written over 30Gb of files I am unable to locate, and on a 120Gb SSD, I will run out of room very soon.
Other things I have tried: deleting notepad.exe, but Windows won't let me, even in Safe Mode; I used a 3rd party process killer from IOBit without success, and an "end stubborn programs", also from IOBit. Nothing I've tried had worked and I'm concerned for my machine, the little HP 2-in-1.
Also, I found 2 instances of notepad.exe on my machine; one in system.32, and the other in the regular Windows folder. I don't recall there being 2 before, so maybe one is bogus and needs to be removed.... IF Windows will let me.
If somebody can help me resolve this I'd be most appreciative. Perhaps an uninstaller/file shredder that uses brute force is the only solution. If I delete/uninstall both to be sure, can I get back notepad exe via a Windows update or something.
TIA, Mark.