The create fellow stopped working for me too .. basically wont create the fellow first, if I go to the meta menu and choose CreateFellowAndRecruit it then does what its supposed to, or if I create a fellow manually and then it recruits members ....
I checked and saw you'd not changed anything so suspect it might be "user error: and it's us that fooking something up
To answer your question regarding notepad ...
Old farts like me have used notepad to edit everything and anything for years, started with HTML before any editors or GUI was available at a reasonable price or remotely worked. Also in my case the GUI makes no sense to me, and clunky as hell. The lay out in the txt format makes sense to my mind though .....
Having said that I realize that editing via notepad can right royally screw up the file and forcing myself to use the GUI so it will become easier the more I use it ---- so pretty much a dinosaur thing (in my case anyways)
Even NASA is telling us how
http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/hessi/solar_install/notepad.html