KB00076 - Sticky changes just before shutting down aren't saved

Background

To explain why this happens, there are a few things to know.

Saving the text contents from a sticky as the user is typing Chinese is inconvenient:
In order to enter Chinese text into a sticky with a Western keyboard, the IME uses a helper:

When Stickies needs to save data, it must ask the Rich Edit control for the current contents. If that little helper window is showing when this is done, the window is closed, even though the user is in the middle of typing.
Writing to a file as the system shuts down is dangerous
Doing so could cause a corrupted data file. If Stickies is partially through writing to a file when it's terminated by Windows, the file might become corrupt, losing the contents, and therefore the user's data.

So, in order to prevent the first problem from occurring, as the user clicks into a sticky, the contents are captured internally to Stickies. If at any time while the cursor is still present in the note, Stickies needs to save its data, and so asks the sticky for its contents, this copy is given and saved instead. This prevents the Chinese Input Method from being disrupted.

When such a save takes place, Stickies then considers all data to have been safely written to disk.

Then, when Stickies is closed, either by the user or by the system as it powered off, this last save operation is considered to have got all data to disk ... even though strictly it hasn't, as the very latest changes to the sticky which still contains the cursor have not yet been written.

This all combines to mean that if the user clicks a sticky, makes changes, waits for more than ten seconds with the cursor in the note, and then closes Stickies, the copy of the information in the note from when they first clicked that note is saved, and not the current text.

So, in order to avoid this, when you're finished making changes to a sticky, click on another window, outside the note, within the next ten seconds.

This does not apply to image stickies.