Just out of curiosity... can the stickies and the general topics be differentiated with a dividing header? If this does not make sense, i've added a screenshot to illustrate what i'm talking about
website code is on public svn (http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/development/), so patches welcome - however, I'm not keen to manage lots of template customisations really, but I wouldn't mind a small template change to have a stickies section I guess. This behaviour can be done currently using "announcement" type which may suffice - see http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=6
I don't really think it will make any difference to people reading the posts though
My thoughts were to make it an inverted color scheme for easy reading. :) Maybe that's not ideal since the site uses this theme in general (except the MediaWiki)