KB00004 - Pressing 's' causes a new sticky to appear

Symptoms

Every time you press the 's' key on the keyboard while Stickies is running, you get a new sticky appear ... or maybe pressing the 's' key has no effect while Stickies is running.

Explanation

Stickies installs what's known as a Global Keyboard Hook so that it gets a look at every key you press on your keyboard. Normally, an application only gets told about keys you press when it has focus - after you've clicked on it. If the hook settings become corrupt, you can see odd things happening when you press the 's' key because the default for creating a new stikcy, or hiding all stickies involves this key.

Solution

First, open the options dialog, click the Hotkeys tab, and make sure that the "Windows key" checkboxes are ticked. If this doesn't help, then restart Stickies. Finally, if nothing is sorting this out then close Stickies, and then delete the file "shook70.dll" from the folder into which you installed Stickies. This file will usually be found at:

As this file contains all the code for handling the hook, when you restart Stickies, that functionality will be disabled, and the problem will be gone.