Metasploit - opening notepad on victims Windows pc

You mean, you would like to show the guy sitting at the remote computer that you are in charge by opening notepad?
You can do that using  
psexec -s -i notepad
(psexec needs to be downloaded, it's part of the free pstools)

To add to that, if you want text in notepad you first create a file containing this text, example (if the file is not located in the same directory you obviously add it here):

C:\Users\me>echo "Hello we have control" > hello.txt

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Then start notepad with that file either with psexec like mentioned above or locally:

C:\Users\me>start notepad hello.txt

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psexec is included in kali?

all i can tell is it doesn't pop up.  
not sure if its run on diff user.  
its running xp sp1 so whoami doesn't work

You could try another way to go about it, schedule a task through the command line to run notepad on a specific time, to get you started you can check here.

can you tell me how to schedule the task through cmd

Psexec is able to do what you want, I used it like this. So copy it to the remote machine, launch your remote shell and use psexec -s -i notepad. It will work.

had to escalate privileges

Sure you have to escalate privileges... remote command prompts with remote admin rights? Who would have thought of that ;)