KB00061 - Scrolling or sizing a sticky causes a system hang

Description

When using the mouse wheel in a sticky, or when sizing it, the entire system will freeze for perhaps a minute, perhaps three or four. The mouse pointer does not move, applications hang.

After leaving your machine alone for a while, control is returned to you.

The problem is intermittent - performing the scroll or resize works sometimes, and causes a problem sometimes.

To see the problem

A number of conditions must be true to see this issue:

• You must be using a skin which uses regioning (non-rectangular)
• The sticky has been transparent at some point - either currently, or previously in this Stickies session
• You use the mouse wheel in the sticky, resize it, or page up/down

Workaround

Either select a skin which does not use regioning, or do not use transparency.

Some people are helped to avoid the problem by:

• Using only plain text (no bold text) in stickies
• Re-setting the skin on received stickies, when it only happens to those

Fix

None I can provide I'm sorry to say. As best I can tell, this is a problem somewhere in MS code. The text box Stickies uses is a MS provided one, and the APIs which Stickies uses are of course calling MS code within Windows. There is some issue with using text boxes in a window which has certain characteristics, which are set when the above conditions are true.

The only other information I've found about this is an article on XTremeVBTalk, but it doesn't offer a solution. If anyone reading this can offer any more insight, I'd be very happy to hear from you... thanks.