Disappearing Cursors in Virtual PC

I’m using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for demos and stuff and the cursor disappears whenever it is suposed to be an I-Beam.  This happens over text boxes and combo boxes – anything with an I-Beam.

I emailed someone on the VPC team and he suggested changing the cursor theme.  This didn’t seem to work but I found a workaround.  I changed two settings in the VPC:  I turned off “hide my cursor when I’m typing” and also turned on the cursor trails.  At least that was I could figure out where my cursor is.

Good enough for now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Virtual PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Disappearing Cursors in Virtual PC”

  1. Jonathan Says:
    October 17, 2007 at 3:54 pm | Reply

    Mark,

    I found your blog while looking into the disappearing cursor problem. You may have found this better workaround, but for posterity…

    This is a problem with Virtual PC’s video acceleration that can be worked around by disabling cursor and bitmap cacheing in the VPC:

    Display Properties > Settings Tab > Advanced > Troubleshoot Tab > Reduce Hardware acceleration to one notch below Full.

    Workaround found here:
    http://msmvps.com/blogs/carlosq/archive/2007/05/02/using-virtual-pc-to-test-visual-studio-quot-orcas-quot.aspx

  2. Waescher Says:
    November 22, 2007 at 10:40 am | Reply

    Hi there,

    I found another workaround which works very fine.
    Just get the cursors from your vista-system (i.e. “C:\Windows\Cursors”) and replace the I-Beam cursor of your current scheme in virtual pc with the cursor you copied from vista.

    It works without disabling the hardware-acceleration :D

    Best regards,
    Waescher

  3. JoyousMN Says:
    April 8, 2008 at 2:15 pm | Reply

    Thanks for this info. I found your site via google search. Your trick of turning off the “disable cursor” plus trails fixed it quite well.

    Thanks.

  4. skybinary Says:
    September 6, 2008 at 5:57 am | Reply

    It has been a thorn in my eye for so long now, the i-beam dissapearing when i hover over any input area when i move the mouse around inside the guest OS.

    I just assumed it was a vista-ism, and only recently decided to see if i could rectify the niggle.

    I tried other cursor themes as vpc suggested but like yourself it didnt help.

    I have turned the accelartion down a notch and i have an i-beam, yay!

    Thanks for the help. Copying vista cursor file sounds like an nice idea because i have had no such problem using xp as a host.

    Makes me wonder what other vista-isms are in-play on my guest OS, especialy problems which are not inherently visible.

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