When you get into this kind of scenario, you have probably done the install of the required dependencies wrong. Things to look for:
If your Notepad++ is a 32-bit executable, you must not have 64-bit DLLs (or vice versa). The bitness of the DLLs and the bitness of
notepad++.exemust match (32-bit to 32-bit, or 64-bit to 64-bit).Make sure you don't have
XMLTools.dllsitting in the base directory where thenotepad++.exelives.Make sure you don't have any of the four
XMLTools.dlldependencies sitting in thepluginsdirectory! Thepluginsdirectory is only for actual Notepad++ plugins; any other DLLs sitting in thepluginsdirectory will be dynamically loaded by Notepad++ and attempted to be activated as plugins. But, sincelibxml2,iconv, etc. are not actual plugins, but rather, dependencies forXMLTools, the dynamic load will fail, because these DLLs do not have the Notepad++ plugin hooks. This will cause weird errors about "ANSI" and stuff.If you don't have any other plugins installed that require native dependencies, you can safely delete any DLL file in the same directory as the
notepad++.exe, except forSciLexer.dll. SciLexer is a core component of Notepad++ and must be kept.If you haven't done this yet, look in
\path_to_your_notepad++_installation\notepad++\plugins\ext_libs
Copy those DLLs to the same directory as notepad++.exe:
iconv.dll libxml2.dll libxslt.dll zlib1.dll