Textpad to completely replace notepad in Win7 - how?

[Tokoloshe]

I know that similar questions have been asked in the past but the relevant threads that I could find were all very old.

The problem:
Right clicking on certain files (eg .bat, .reg) and selecting "Edit" starts Notepad, not TextPad.

Some programs are hard wired to start Notepad when they call a text editor.


Solutions that I know of:
The first problem can be worked around by picking "TextPad" rather than the "Edit" option from the menu (but I would still like to be able to select "Edit".)

I know that waaay back, the easy way to do this was to get a copy of txplink, rename it notepad.exe and use that (and it worked very nicely). However, I believe that this isn't appropriate in Win7 (and Vista?) so I was wondering what the best way to go about it is.


So, what do I want?
I know how to associate files with Textpad so that it opens them by default. That's not a problem. This question is about all the other ways in which Notepad can be called upon to do its stuff. I'd rather have Textpad all the time.

Can it be done in Win7 (I have Win7 64 bit ultimate).

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

[Tokoloshe]

So far this seem to do the job but I'd still like to know if there is an official way to do it.

[edit] It doesn't seem to pass command line parameters properly if you use the right-click/print command on a file. I don't use that though. [/edit]