Where does the new notepad with Windows 11 save the window position?

For Windows 11, the location HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Notepad is no longer used to save window size and position for notepad. Exploring and testing do not provide a new registry location for this.

Solution 1:

If you run Process Monitor when opening and closing Notepad, you will see values read from a registry key that looks like the following:

E.g.

Notepad.exe RegQueryValue \REGISTRY\WC\Silo16cb54f5-9094-87ae-d593-50e2dc13f03cuser_sid\Software\Microsoft\Notepad\iWindowPosY SUCCESS Type: REG_DWORD, Length: 4, Data: 669

You will note that the start of the path isn't a commonly seen registry hive such as HKCU, HKLM, etc..

What is \REGISTRY\WC? Well looking under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\hivelist

You can see the various .dat files that back the possible registry hives, so in the case of Notepad, the .dat files on my computer are under:

C:\ProgramData\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe\S-1-5-21-4143797489-525809663-3828285892-1047\SystemAppData\Helium\Cache

Where: The SID value, in this case S-1-5-21-4143797489-525809663-3828285892-1047, is the SID of the account running Notepad.

If you run from a command prompt: whoami /user you will see the SID for the account running the command prompt.

So to answer your question, the configuration is contained in the .dat files.