Notepad++ was one of the few bright spots of my erstwhile Windows days, and I still wish for it when I occasionally find myself using Gedit for quick note taking. It was sooo fast with just the right features and nothing supurfluous. But I could never go back to it from Vim now.

As for uninstalling issues, if you can't use the package management tools to uninstall (you compiled from source and/or manually installed?), in the future try using GNU Stow or xStow to group all the pieces in a single directory and then symlinking them to the various system directories. It's brilliant. http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/