Glad you corrected this - I'm not that proficient on Windows ;-)

UCS-2 and UTF-16 are practically identical. The former is fixed width (like iso-latin-1) and the latter is variable width (like UTF-8). The pros and cons for using UTF-8 over iso-latin-1 also apply to using UTF-16 over UCS-2.

Windows uses UCS-2LE. Not knowing anything about UCS-2 'til today, I've been blindly using UTF-16LE.

I wonder about the leading sequence 0xff 0xfe in notepad saved text files - is that some marker indicating the encoding type?

It's a Byte Order Mark (BOM).