[bnegreve]

Notepad runs in userland under the supervision of the kernel. This is a driver and could be running in kernel mode. It could make a big difference.

Even if it's not malicious, I still think it is a rather serious professional mistake to ship a driver containing potentially dangerous deadcode.

[vertex-four]

There's plenty of "rather serious professional mistakes" in whatever operating system you happen to run in the first place - it's very rare that something that doesn't affect security in any meaningful way gets the attention this has.