Spell check broken in 9.9.6

[kevinHealy]

# background

I amusing the very latest version 9.9.6 of TextPad, installed on my fully patched Windows 11 PC.

Spell checking used to work fine.

Out of the blue recently, it stopped working correctly.

In particular, it is failing to recognize words that I know that I have added a long time ago to the dictionary.


# precise example

1) I open a large (> 30,000 line) text file that I have been actively appending to for years

2) I start a spell check as usual: Tools --> Spelling...

3) in this particular file, the tool finds the first example of a word that it thinks is wrong which is "etc"
--this is COMPLETELY unexpected: this file has easily 100+ occurrences of "etc" in it that never used to get flagged as typos...

4 I click on the "Add" button to add "etc" to the dictionary, since TextPad is now claiming that it is not in there yet

5) the spell check goes on to find the next spelling error, but I decide to abort the process now, so I click on the "Close" button"

6) I try a spell check again just to see if this time it remembers that I have added "etc"

7) NO: it does not remember, it flags the first occurrence of "etc" in my document as a typo

This is infuriating: to my knowledge I have done nothing to change my TextPad configuration in a while!


# "etc" DOES seem to have been added to (or, MORE LIKELY, was already present in) TextPad's dictionary:

1) Execute Configure --> Preferences... --> Spelling.
Note: Language is "English (United States)".

2) Click on "Edit..."

3) click on the "Add" tab (if it is not already selected; by default it seems to be).

I clearly see "etc" near the top, as well as many other words that I added over time

Indeed, the words what I am seeing here appear to be the same as the contents of the file %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Spelling\en-US\default.dic which is the file that I think TextPad's spell check uses.

Note: the very first word under this "Add" tab is #LID 1033 and there is text at the bottom of the dialog which says:
WARNING: do not modify the first line!

But it gets WEIRDER:
--suppose that I click on another tab in this "Edit..." dialog, like "Replace" or "Ignore"
--either of those contains no words in it
--then if I go back to the "Add" tab all of its 100s of words are now gone!


# another test

I next tried adding the gibberish word "fdsggdgfdhfhjfgjhjhjf" to the start of my text file.

I ran Spelling... once again and of course it immediately finds "fdsggdgfdhfhjfgjhjhjf", so I Add it as a new word and then I Close Spelling...

I ran Spelling... once again and this time it skips over "fdsggdgfdhfhjfgjhjhjf" and finds the next word that it thinks is wrong, which is "etc".

But I next once more did:
--Configure --> Preferences... --> Spelling
--click on "Edit..."
--examine the "Add" tab: I do NOT see "fdsggdgfdhfhjfgjhjhjf" having been added there

Conclusion: while I saw "etc" in TextPad's dictionary, this test makes me think that it was already there.


# further things that I have done:

1) Inspect the dictionary file %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Spelling\en-US\default.dic
--YES "etc" is in this file
--YES this file has UTF-16 LE with BOM

2) Check permissions on the dictionary file
--YES: my Windows user account has "Full Control" permission

3) Check permissions on its parent folder %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Spelling\en-US\
--YES: my Windows user account has "Full Control" permission

4) Check if the dictionary file is set to read-only
--No it is not

5) run TextPad as Administrator
--made no difference, see same symptoms as above

6) new file test:
--Create a brand-new file with exactly this content NEWLY TYPED IN:
etc
teh
--run Spelling...
--it finds "etc" as the first bad word
--conclusion: Punctuation / word-boundary rules and Hidden Unicode characters are likely NOT the reason for "etc" now being a bad word

7) use new state files:
--I closed TextPad
--in File Explorer I went to the TextPad state file directory
%APPDATA%\Helios\TextPad\9
--I moved these exiting files to a new directory named BAK:
ConfigState.xml
GUIConfig.xml
--I opened TextPad, and it recreated brand new versions of those 2 text files
--TextPad also automatically opened its Readme file
C:\Program Files\TextPad\Readme\Readme.txt
--I spell checked that Readme file
--its first typo found was "statusbar" so I clicked Add to add that word to the dictionary, then I hit Close to end the spell check
--I started a new spell check and this time it failed once again on "statusbar"
--I did Configure --> Preferences... --> Spelling, click on "Edit...", and under the "Add" tab I did NOT see "statusbar" having been added
--conclusion: corrupt state files likely not the explanation


# other weird symptoms

I have seen 2 other strange isues during spell checks which also have me concerned:

If I click on "Ignore All" to skip a word that I do NOT want added to the dictionary, I have seen the spell check tool nonetheless still flag examples of that word during the same spell check session. So, it failed to ignore every occurrence as it should have.

I have seen a spell check automatically correct words that it did NOT notify me about.
This should NOT happen because I have not enabled "Auto correct" as a Spelling Preference.


# factor #1: TextPad Update

I updated TextPad from a 9.8.x version I think to the latest version 9.9.6 maybe 12 days ago.

I did this update "in place", that is instead of uninstalling the old TextPad version first, I simply installed the new version.

I am 90% sure that I tried spell check in the last 12 days after this upgrade, and it worked, but I may have been spell checking different documents that were simpler than the one that I am currently working on.


# factor #2: Microsoft Update

I also recently applied the latest Microsoft Updates.

These include the massive changes from the latest 2026 June Patch Tuesday:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft ... atch-asap/

Is it possible that a Microsoft Update is responsible for this?

[bbadmin]

I'm seeing this behavior in all versions back to TextPad 9.0, so something must have changed in the operating system. On my PC, words are being added to the language neutral dictionary, rather the currently selected language:

Code: Select all

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Spelling\neutral\default.dic

Will have to investigate why.

UPDATE: Notepad also adds words to the language neutral default.dic file so I've reported this as a bug to Microsoft. Their response is below, so don't hold your breath for a fix, but upvote it if you can find it!

Screenshot 2026-06-15 120457.png (23.04 KiB) Viewed 29 times