Here's a puzzling problem - maybe somebody has an idea. Right now I am out of ideas.

On Win7 64bit, the following crashes Notepad:

1. On Desktop, right click, select "New | Text Document". This creates "New Text Document.txt".
2. Right click on that file, select "Edit". This opens notepad with the empty file.
3. Select "File | Save as": Notepad crashes and Win7 reports that "Notepad has stopped working".

Now, move the file to c:\temp and repeat steps 2 and 3: no crash this time and the save-as dialog appears normally. I can create similar steps for the "open" dialog.

Things I have tried:

• Safe mode - does not work, same problem
• Create a new user and try again logged in as that user - no crash
• Name file differently, or create elsewhere and then move to desktop - same problem
• Use Wordpad instead - same problem
• Review shell extensions with ShellExView - nothing extraordinary here
• Stare at the event log entries for each of the crashes. Does not enlighten me.
• At time of crash look at the process explorer stack view. Hangs at a function "TaskDialog".
• sfc.exe /scannow repaired some files but the problem persists.

This is how the event log entries look like:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Application Error
Date:          14.12.2010 00:33:48
Event ID:      1000
Task Category: (100)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
Faulting application name: NOTEPAD.EXE, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc9b3
Faulting module name: COMCTL32.dll, version: 6.10.7600.16661, time stamp: 0x4c6f6e4b
Exception code: 0xc000041d
Fault offset: 0x00000000000db770
Faulting process id: 0x198
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb9b1e140ab92a
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\system32\NOTEPAD.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.7600.16661_none_fa62ad231704eab7\COMCTL32.dll

What else should I try, short of dumping my user and starting over with a new profile? Thanks...