I finally decided to give up on the built-in Windows Notepad (I know, I know, a long time coming). I decided to go with Notepad2, but quickly ran into a couple of issues with replacing the built-in notepad so that Notepad2 would come up in its place. Here’s what had to happen:

1. Go to Windows\Notepad.exe, right click..Properties.
2. Go to Security tab, click Advanced.
3. Go to Owner tab..click Edit and select Administrators in “Change Owner to”. Click ok.
4. Go to Permissions tab..click Edit and select Administrators..click Edit..check Allow/Full Control. Click ok.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for Windows\System32\Notepad.exe.
6. Rename both Windows\Notepad.exe and Windows\System32\Notepad.exe to Notepad_Original.exe.
7. Rename your desired notepad replace executable to Notepad.exe and copy the file to both Windows and Windows\System32.
8. Ah, you thought you were done? No, no, no, now we need to take care of the pesky “The publisher could not be verified” dialog box that appears every time that you try to run Notepad.exe now.
9. Run gpedit.msc.
10. Go to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Attachment Manager.
11. Double-click “Inclusion list for moderate risk file types.
12. On the setting tab, ensure that the Enabled radio button is checked.
13. In the list of ‘moderate risk extensions’ type in notepad.exe. This is case-sensitive, so be sure that you have the correct name. A second option here is to just include all executables using *.exe.
    1. This policy setting allows you to configure the list of moderate risk file types. If the attachment is in the list of moderate risk file types and is from the restricted or Internet zone, Windows prompts the user before accessing the file. This inclusion list overrides the list of potentially high risk file types built into Windows and it takes precedence over the Low risk inclusion list but has a lower precedence than the High risk inclusion list (where an extension is listed in more than one inclusion list.)