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I'm running TP 4.5 on Win2K SP2, IBM ThinkPad A20p.

I often try to fire up TP by right-clicking on a file visible in the Windows Explorer and selecting "TextPad" from the resulting menu. After a fresh boot this works fine for a while (often measured in days) before I start getting an explorer.exe hang (no TP window appears and the explorer window gets hung), and once it starts hanging it does so pretty consistently for all subsequent attempts. I end up having to end the process by closing the window or using the Task Manager to clean things up. Doing a "Send To->TextPad" consistently works fine. After a reboot things work well again until some point in the future when the hangs return.

Does anyone have any ideas about what might be going on?

I can tell you "what" but not "why". It is apparently an issue with something in shellext.dll, the TextPad handler for that. The shellext.dll file apparently was "broken" by Win2K/XP - I don't know for certain how well it worked with Win9x or NT, but the version stamp on the file is 1.0.0 and it has an internal date of 1998, so it is possible that there were other compatibility issues with 98.

I think there's been no motivation to write a new DLL - since the "Send To" works, and (provided that your machine doesn't take forever to display SendTo's contents) since SendTo is inherently much faster.

So - no help there. But I don't expect it to be fixed as-is.