Dialog: '"C:\Program" doesn't exist. Create it?' on startup every time

brihulse

Every time I start notepad++ I see a dialog with title Create new file and message “C:\Program” doesn’t exist. Create it?

It seems like it’s trying to open the change.log file from “C:\Program Files…” but doesn’t recognize the space in the file path (i know, windows right?).

Is there any way to fix this? It doesn’t cause any issues after ignoring the popup, it’s more of an annoyance. I’m on windows 10 running v7.5.9 64-bit.

Meta Chuh

@brihulse

this must be something else, maybe a faulty plugin that tries to open a path without " "

for a crosscheck please download the portable version, extract it to your desktop,
rename the notepad++ folder to something with a space
and run notepad++.exe from it.

then additionally open any file within a folder containing a space, into a new tab,
then close and reopen notepad++ to see what happens

download link: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/repository/7.x/7.5.9/npp.7.5.9.bin.zip

note: the portable version can coexist with your installed version.
any settings, plugins or changes made there will not reflect to the installed version or vice versa

PeterJones

@brihulse,

Was v7.5.9 your first install of notepad++, or had you had previous versions and upgraded?

In some older versions, the shortcut (pinned in the start menu, or maybe pinned in the application bar, or maybe saved to desktop or other shortcut location) got pinned with trying to open the change.log file. I thought that had been fixed multiple sub-versions ago… but it’s been quite a while since I’ve installed notepad++ on a brand new system, so I don’t know. If that bug still exists during install, or if your shortcut was a holdover from a previous version, that might explain why it’s trying to open change.log.

But it might also be that you save previous sessions, and you had opened some other file in “C:\Program Files…”, and that it’s having a problem properly handling spaces in filenames in the saved sessions. You might try closing all open files, then exiting Notepad++ (so it’s got an empty session), then relaunch Notepad++ (with an empty session, and if it’s not a bad shortcut, then I would guess the dialog won’t pop up now); then some other file from “C:\Program Files…”, then exiting Notepad++ (so it saves the session with that file open), then relaunch Notepad++ again, and see whether the dialog pops up. If it does this time, but didn’t with an empty session, then it is probably a bug with the sessions (which you can report following these instructions). If it has completely stopped giving the popup, then maybe NPP changed the way it saves session data for files with spaces in the names, and that re-saving a fresh session fixed it.

Let us know the results of those experiments.

Andy Arismendi

This was happening to me and I uninstalled and cleared out every notepad++ folder I could find afterward and it kept happening.

Turns out it was the Notepad++ shortcut in my Windows 10 taskbar. I deleted it and created a new one by re-pinning it from the start menu after re-installing. My guess is the original one didn’t have quotes around the working directory.