When I open a document tapd opens, closes, and opens a blank document.

tpad is only designed to edit UTF-8 text documents. If a document with another encoding is opened tpad will attempt to convert the contents to UTF-8 prior to displaying the document. If document has content that is not UTF-8 and tpad is unable to convert the contents for any reason, tpad automatically exits and relaunches because it has no way of handling the content. In order to keep tpad small, simple, and fast it was decided to not try to make tpad anything more then a basic text editor with a few golden extras like spell checking and syntax highlighting.