Josh Yelon, sorry, but that is not quite true.
If you enter NotePad, then click File>Save, you can see a box somewhere with “Text documents (.txt)”, right? Change that to “All files.” or something like that.
Now, enter foo.py in the box and it will save as foo.py instead of foo.py.txt
About the Blender crash, go to blender.org and download the newest Blender version. That will fix it (I think).
If that does not fix the problem, install this package from microsoft..