Dennis,
I'm not sure reinstalling IE will solve your problem. Some of the newsgroup replies speak of clearing cache, temporary files, messing with the Registry, etc., to fix this problem, but that is something I do regularly, and NotePad always opened with the desired HTML code. Suddenly, NotePad opened with nothing in the page.
Try this: Make sure that "notepad.exe" is present in your PC. I did a search for all occurances of "notepad" and came up with two 65K versions in the c:\windows and c:\program files\internet explorer\connection wizard. There was a third file in c:\windows\system32, but it was only 3K. I opened it with an editor and found an "MZ" file identifier (which means nothing to me). But, renaming this file to "Xnotepad.exe" made the HTML code suddenly reappear when I click on View Source. This anomaly just seemed to happen, and I have no idea how it got there.
I hope this helps.