...or "A welcome message from you suddenly appeared" and all other stickies are lost

If you've been using Stickies for a while, and one day you start your machine and see only a single sticky, reading "Welcome to Stickies, I hope you find it useful", this means that at startup Stickies has tried to read its ini file, and has not been able to. This might mean that something unpleasant happened as you shut down your machine, or maybe something interfered as Stickies started. Basically, something got in the way of Stickies.

My best guess is that AV software interferes with start-up in some way. I've coded for this, in that if the app detects that the data file exists, but then receives an error when reading it, will pause and throw up a dialog, giving the AV product a chance to move on/finish what it's doing.

Solution one
For those running Windows XP/Vista/7

If you run Windows XP, and are using System Restore, you can probably use this to get the data back. Go to the Help and Support Center, and click "Undo changes to your computer with System Restore"

Solution two

A second data file, stickies.bak is written in case of the above. It's a copy of the ini - just quit Stickies and rename it back to be stickies.ini.

From v6.0a of Stickies, a third file is written, stickies.24h, every 24 hours of operation, which gives a third level of backup. This can again be renamed back to stickies.ini.

From v7.0a of Stickies, a fourth file is written, stickies.1wk, every one week of operation, which gives a fourth level of backup. This can again be renamed back to stickies.ini.

Solution three

If you reach this third option, you'll need to go to your most recent backup for the stickies.ini file, which is the one which holds all your data. I hope you were backing up the data directory...

I hope you're able to sort this out. Losing data is the worst thing an app can do, which is why I've made the process of storing data as bullet proof as possible.