I think i sort of got it now...
i copy pasted the characters from notepad to a script to ASC("") them and they were all chr(10). then i used the following code :
code:

redirectoutput("uselist.txt",1)
use list
redirectoutput("")
if open (1,"uselist.txt") = 0 endif
if open (2,"testoutput.txt",5) = 0 endif
$line = readline(1)
  while @error = 0
  $line = $line + chr(13) + chr(10)
  $rc = writeline(2,$line)
  $line ?
  $line = readline(1)
loop

to manually add the chr(13) before and then it opens normally in notepad.

Now the question is, why does the use list "forget" to add the chr(13) to the end of each line ??? or is it intended to ?
are there more commands that have this problem ?? i have never seen it happen when using dos redirection with ">"

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rgrds, Maarten