Open Windows Write (WRI) files on Windows 11 using legacy versions of WordPad

In my previous post a few years ago, I found that CWordPad, a WordPad clone for Windows 98, can open Windows Write (WRI) files on Windows 11 without issues. Otherwise, opening WRI files requires either LibreOffice—a relatively large download—or running WRITE.EXE from Windows 3.1 via OTVDM, which is not a trivial process. After the latest update to Windows 11 (24H2) officially removed WordPad from my laptop, I revisited the topic again in an attempt to locate a lightweight note taking application for Windows 11 which can still open WRI files.

Reinstalling WordPad, as well as classic versions of other Windows application such as Calculator, Paint, Notepad, is easy. Just download and run the installer from here and you will be greeted with the familiar WordPad ribbon interface, which hasn’t changed since Windows 7:

This version of WordPad only supports Rich Text Format (RTF) and Word 2007 (DOCX) files only – there is no support for Windows Write (WRI) or Word 97-2003 (DOC) format, as shown in the File Open dialog:

WordPad for Windows XP, on the other hand, supports RTF, DOC and WRI file formats, but not DOCX. It has the classic Windows UI interface with menu and toolbars, without the ribbon tab:

Support for different file types is handled by various conversion filters such as MSWRD6.WPC (for Word 6.0), MSWRD8.WPC (for Word 97) and WRITE.WPC (for Windows Write). Word 6.0 documents are handled reasonably well. Simple Word 97 documents with only basic formatting can be opened while more complicated documents will crash WordPad. Windows Write documents cannot be opened if WordPad is run from Windows 11, likely because the WRITE.WPC filter uses 16-bit code and cannot be started on a 64-bit OS. Word for Windows 2.0 documents will also fail to open with an error message – “Can not load Word for Windows 2.0 files”:

If DOC doesn’t show up as a supported file format in WordPad for Windows XP, try adding EnableLegacyConverters = 1 (DWORD) to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Wordpad and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Wordpad

The Help menu of WordPad for Windows XP doesn’t load the WORDPAD.HLP file on Windows 11, even after WINHLP32.EXE has been installed. This is also the last version of WordPad that comes with embedded help documentation. Starting from Windows Vista, Microsoft replaced the Help menu of WordPad (and most built-in Windows apps such as Paint or Notepad) with a useless Bing search window for keywords “Help with Wordpad in Windows”:

WordPad for Windows 98 also fails to open PRINTERS.WRI file when running on Windows 11, showing gibberish contents:

WordPad for Windows 95 appears to start up fine on Windows 11. It comes with 2 filters, MSWD6_32.WPC for Word 6.0 documents and WRITE32.WPC for Windows Write documents. The suffix “32” in the filename implies that there exist 16-bit versions of these filters, MSWD6_16.WPC and WRITE16.WPC, which are nowhere to be found on the Internet. Trying to open or save a document using File > Open and File > Save however crashes WordPad, although various other dialogs such as Format > Font or Insert > Object show up and work fine. A quick debug attempt with WinDbg reveals a crash in COMDLG32.DLL, a DLL responsible for handling common dialogs for opening/saving files. I suspect that the Windows 95 version of WordPad relies on deprecated 16-bit method signatures within COMDLG32.DLL to display the file open/save dialog, which has been removed in modern version of Windows. Passing the file to open to WordPad for Windows 95 from command line e.g. “wordpad.exe printers.wri” however works fine, indicating that there are no issues with this version of WRITE32.WPC  on Windows 11. Saving a document is still impossible without a way to patch the deprecated calls to COMDLG32.DLL.

WordPad for Windows NT 3.51, somewhat surprisingly, is able to open WRI files with no issues on Windows 11. Embedded images (added for testing) are also correctly displayed. Menu Help > Help Topics operates correctly using WINHLP32.EXE. This version of WordPad supports Rich Text Format (RTF) and obviously TXT files, and is good enough for simple note taking in my opinion.

In contrast, WordPad for Windows NT 4.0 is unable to open WRI files on Windows 11 – only corrupted text is displayed. NT 3.51 is the last NT operation system (which is 32-bit) that is fully compatible with 16-bit applications, which is perhaps why the WRITE32.WPC filter which comes with WordPad for NT 3.51 is more robust and can still run on Windows 11 after all these years. The same behavior is also observed for a few other Windows NT 3.51 apps – for example, PBRUSH.EXE taken from NT 3.51 works fine on Windows 11, and its File Open dialog is able to handle long file names:

If you want to try this out, copy PBRUSH.EXE (and optionally, PBRUSH.HLP) from directory C:\WINNT35\system32 on your NT 3.51 installation to an empty folder on your Windows 11 installation, and run PBRUSH.EXE. If you extract your entire NT 3.51 VirtualBox VDI image (for example, by using 7-Zip) and run PBRUSH.EXE from the system32 folder with other files in it, you will most likely encounter an error message similar to “The procedure entry point wcstok could not be located”:

The error is most likely due to how Windows searches and loads the DLLs (and other dependencies) required by the calling application. The working directory and the executable directory are usually searched first, followed by several system directories, although the behavior can be changed by SetDllDirectory or SetDefaultDllDirectories. If PBRUSH.EXE is launched from a directory containing other NT 3.51 DLLs , Windows 11 will attempt to load the NT 3.51 versions of these DLLs (which were designed for NT 3.51) and fail due to incompatibilities. If PBRUSH.EXE is however launched from its own directory, Windows 11 will load the correct version of these DLLs from system directories such as C:\Windows\System32, which will work since the Windows 11 versions of these files still maintain backwards compatibility with older versions.

You can download a ZIP archive containing various versions of WordPad for Windows NT 3.51, 95, 98, ME, Vista, XP and 7 from this link.

See also
Open Windows Write (.WRI) files on modern versions of Windows with CWordPad