KB00014 - Stickies don't look right when using transparency
It might look a bit like this:
What you can see there is a classic example of the problem which shows up on some people's systems, when they use transparency. Stickies uses the same drawing code for notes all the time. I know that code works, because opaque stickies show up ok. When you set a transparent window, two Win32 API calls set the window as transparent, and Windows is supposed to handle it from there. There's no alpha blending code or similar in Stickies.
To resolve that issue, either disable transparency, or change your video card and/or drivers.
I'm hoping that Vista will handle transparency a little better across video cards, but I do believe the issue to be with Windows somewhere, and not with Stickies :(