Notepad++ 7.9.3 silently crashes on startup

[greg-michael]

We were previously running NPP 7.9.1, and over the weekend patched to v7.9.3. Now, on our patched systems, NPP silently crashes with the below logged in Event Viewer:

Faulting application name: notepad++.exe, version: 7.9.3.0, time stamp: 0x60288871
Faulting module name: clr.dll, version: 4.8.4311.0, time stamp: 0x5fbdcb6d
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000669f10
Faulting process id: 0xf70
Faulting application start time: 0x01d7145444e560b7
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET \Framework64\v4.0.30319\clr.dll
Report Id: 832a8428-8047-11eb-8138-0050568c2ed3
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Has anyone run into this yet or previously and found a work-around or solution? I did not find anything specifically related to this when I searched the Community.

[Alan Kilborn]

@greg-michael

Do you use the SaveAsAdmin plugin?
If so try removing it (by renaming).
If you don’t use it, perhaps try removing other plugins and see if N++ starts up.

[PeterJones]

@greg-michael,

Has anyone run into this yet or previously

The easiest way is by looking in the forums, especially at the “Notepad++ v7.9.3 Released” topic

There, you can see László Botka and David Michael Paxton both posted similar symptoms, and links to official issue#9514 . Or there’s this topic which also reports the problem.

@Alan-Kilborn beat me to the SaveAsAdmin suggestion, but since there are a lot of plugins out there, it is quite possible that more plugins are using the same outdated calls that SaveAsAdmin uses, and thus might cause similar crashes. If you do not have SaveAsAdmin, goto c:\Program Files\Notepad++\ and rename the Plugins directory to xPlugins or something similar. If that fixes your problem, then you can figure out which plugin is causing the problem by going back to Plugins and renaming the individual subfolders until you find out which plugin causes the problem (if you need help, let us know, and give us a directory listing of c:\Program Files\Notepad++\Plugins so that we can give you good guidance on the steps to take). Even if you find it yourself, it will be useful for us to know if another plugin is causing the problem, so please let us know whether the culprit was SaveAsAdmin or some other plugin (and if it’s another plugin, we can inform that plugin’s author/maintainer of the problem).

[greg-michael]

Thanks @PeterJones and @Alan-Kilborn. I’ll take a look through the plugins. I know that some of the servers do have the SaveAsAdmin plugin, so that might be where I start. I’ll post back one way or the other if that solves the issue and/or if there are any other plugins that are contributing.

[greg-michael]

It was indeed the NppSaveAsAdmin plugin. Once it was removed, things returned to normal. Thanks again!

[PeterJones]

@greg-michael ,

Great!

I don’t know if you noticed, but this comment in the SaveAsAdmin issue ticket says that if you go back to 1.0.172 of the plugin, it correctly works with Notepad++ v7.9.3.

Oh, even better: he’s released 1.0.211 , which includes the fix so that the newest SaveAsAdmin won’t crash Notepad++. You should be able to install that version of the plugin, and Notepad++ should be able to load again.

[greg-michael]

@PeterJones Excellent! I’ll give it a go. Thanks again!