2) The fine grained ACLs are good, but they often don't seem to work properly. On Win2k8 I've encountered cases where an account belongs to the Administrator's group but it somehow does not have enough permissions to rewrite/save a file that "full access" permissions to those in the Administrator's group. Why can't I open the file, change it and save it back? When I use that account to copy a file onto that file I get a "privilege escalation" prompt and if I "OK" it it overwrites the file. So the account is definitely in the Administrators group already...
It's UAC. If you're in the Administrators or Domain Admins group and have UAC turned on, you're not *really* in that group. If you start your editor by right clicking it and choose Run as Admin (receiving the UAC prompt), the editor is now running with Admin/Domain Admin credentials, so you can edit that file as you see fit.
Just double clicking the file opens it as a normal user, without either of those groups, which is why you can't save over the top of it. If this really annoys you, change the permissions so another group you're a member of has rights to it.
1) Add notepad, texteditor and hexeditor shortcuts to your SendTo folder. If you are unclear on where your SendTo folder is (because of roaming profiles or other weirdness), go to start, and run shell:sendto
I would add WinMerge to that as well - that's been useful a few times when exporting registry settings and the like.
4) notepad++ is often better than notepad :).
NotePad++ is ALWAYS better than Notepad! :)