In TextEdit on Mac, that is the default, but you can turn off all the options for rich text etc. to turn it into a plain text editor if required. Perhap the same with Notepad.
Well thank gawd someone else confirmed what I’ve been going through.
But I’m using Word 2003 just so everyone knows.
You see I don’t save the notepads, I just have tons of them open for this very reason, to copy & paste text from Word or also to re-copy the same text over & over again for other reasons.
I’ve been trying to copy it from notepad to another notepad & that didn’t cause problems, but now I’m not sure if that was what solved the problem, or it was just b/c I had no bullets in that copy.
I can’t remember now if there was any functions like that when I had issues. I think one situation I didn’t have bullets, so I think it happens even when it’s just plain text.
@ralph.m : Not a chance. This is Windows. 
@2012 : I only saved to see if Notepad would whinge about that there were Unicode or other characters in the text and that formatting would be lost when save with ANSI encoding. (That’s what you want to happen in this case.) But it didn’t.
I sometimes use the address bar of any browser to rid off special formatting. Just copy+paste into the address bar. Select the lot in the address bar, and copy+paste from the address bar. But there are limits on the size of the text with this one. Just hit escape to rid off the text and get the URL back.
You can find the ‘special paste’ command by clicking on the drop down arrow of the ‘paste’ command at the home tab. I’ve just tried copying some info with links and other stuffs and use the special paste command to get rid of little nasties… It works…