Disappearance from the system tray

The main icon is pinned to the taskbar so it is always available to me (Windows 8.1) but the tray icon often disappears.  This has happened each time that I have used the program.  I never turn the computer off and the stickies icon lasts from between four hours to three weeks but eventually disappears.  My problem is that there is no option to save the stickies from the Manage Stickies command center.  If it is possible, could you please add a save option to the Manage Stickies.  In all fairness, the loss is not too great because I have the automatic backup set to an hour.  Thank you for your application.  Even with this problem, it is a very valuable application for me.

You're not running into this, are you:

http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/support/kb.pl?q=00078

Tom

Tom, thanks for your reply.  My problem is a little different.  Whenever there is a reboot, the icon shows up and stays in the tray for some arbitrary length of time.  Perhaps several weeks (I do not reboot often) but eventually it will disappear and I have no way to save my latest changes.  In retrospect, I should not have bothered you because I can probably close the program if I do not see the icon in the system tray and then start it up again before I add anything new.  Is it possible to save the stickies if the icon is not available?  Maybe I missed something in the documentation.

Thanks, again.

When the icon disappears, are there still notes on the screen?

If you did need to close Stickies at that point (or any other time!) then you can click any note and press Alt-F4 to terminate the app gracefully.  Same goes for all other Windows app, actually.

However, even if the tray icon has disappeared, if the app is running then I've no reason to think it won't still be saving any content.  Something might have eaten the icon ... but the rest of the app should still be running.

If you're interested in troubleshooting, then you can send an API command to Stickies ("do recreateicon") to ask it to put the icon back.  That's another way of getting back the icon.  Quicker to run than closing and re-opening the app, but you'd need to spend a little time now to automate the process.

Tom

Hi Tom,

Reviving a very old thread with an unresolved frustration!

I too have this issue (still!). Icon disappears from tray. Sometimes clearly because it never got the signal that explorer was closing (I terminated it.
The problem is because the stickies application doesn't check if it is still visible in the system tray know to put it's icon back into the explorer system tray if not.
Sure the program is not wasting (little) CPU cycles checking to see if it's in the task tray but...
When Explorer restarts, the program is still running and should call a function to insert it's icon back into the task tray.
Most other system tray occupying programs programs already do this automatically.

Windows actually sends a message, WM_TASKBARCREATED, when the taskbar is recreated after an Explorer crash. So could can create an event handler to register their icon again in that specific case.

Any chance of a fix during next update?

best regards,
Lee

Stickies has handled the WM_TASKBARCREATED message since about v3.  Back then, Windows Explorer used to crash a lot more, so it was more of an issue.


You can't check for the icon from a previous instance and then take it over.  It's something which doesn't belong to "you" at that point.  Heck, even Windows doesn't really know the icon has been orphaned until you mouse over it.


Tom