I have had the problem from time to time. I am an experimenter so, in my case, I found restoring an earlier (Acronis) image did the trick. Othet than that I failed on all counts to get notepad working again.
In the end, I installed EditPad lite, which is, in any case, a superior program. Works like a charm!
But, to the point, I suspected the original fault has something to do with the use of Ccleaner. Since the problem started, I have twice upgraded Ccleaner to a later version and (I think!) the problem has gone away.