Abhijeet Maharana

I recently came across a virtual Windows XP setup with an annoying issue: mouse pointer disappears when over a text field / label. Text could be selected provided one knew where to start selecting.

Configuration:

• Hardware: Dell Latitude D630 laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo 1.80 GHz
• Host: Windows Vista Business 32-bit
• VirtualBox: 1.5.0
• Guest: Windows XP Pro 32-bit with Service Pack 2

Googling for “virtualbox disappearing pointer” showed that VirtualBox eats up the pointer far too often. Users had reported various issues from pointer disappearing completely to pointer disappearing after switching users. I also came across a “Disappearing mouse pointer over text” thread but it didn’t solve the problem.

With a few trials and errors, I found that changing the text pointer solves the issue. Though at this point, I can’t explain why.

1. Go to Control Panel >> Mouse >> Pointers tab.
2. Select “Text Select” under Customize and click on browse.
3. Select a pointer other that the default such as “beam_r.cur”.