After a fair amount of painful searching through the rubble of relisting software sites I finally found TextPad, which is ninble and does grep just fine. I needed to do a bunch of string replacing on a pretty big file, over a meg, and the normal apps, including word, were choking on the replacement big-time. TextPad whacked it out in a total of ten seconds of user-time. Right on.
I was a TextPad man for years, then I found Notepad++:
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Seems to have a whole lot more bells and whistles that I like from my mainframe text-editing days, plus stuff that I like for internet tube working.