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I'm running W10-64 (inside VirtualBox). Have done so for several months. Suddenly my machine exposes a strange behaviour that I have not seen before: after rebooting, the Mouse pointer changes into the "Wait State" and stays like that. I can start apps and use them without problems - the mouse pointer being the only problem, because pointing at things is not easy with the hourglass.

  • Looking through the list of recently installed apps, I see my company's app (harmless, installed before), Visual C++ 2015 Redistributables, Skype 7.5 and GitHub - nothing suspicious, I think.

  • After start, the CPU-Load goes to 100% but normalizes after everything has been loaded, and tasklist does not show anything using abnormal CPU%. CPU-Load while writing this msg in Chrome is around 20% (with 2 Cores).

  • Autoruns did not show anything that looked obviously wrong (no suspicious or unfamiliar names). However, I may have been tricked. But this setup took a long time of fiddling and has worked so nicely...until the mouse cursor disappeared. It would be great if this could be sorted out w/o having to uninstall everything - but even though I'm a developer, I'm not knowledgeable enough about the details of the Windows mechanics to fix this on my own...

P.S: following up on music2myear's suggestion, I tried to change the display of the mouse - it has no effect. I also visited https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_cursor just to see if the mouse would respond to CSS-Settings - it does not! (Apologies for posting a W3-Site ;-))

P.P.S: have also tried to disable all entries in Taskmanager's Autostart-Tab - no effect!

MBaas
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  • Have you tried changing the mouse pointer to a different style and then back? – music2myear Nov 14 '17 at 16:30
  • Not yet! Just did it and selected a different cursor for the „Busy“-State, yet this had no immefiate effect when I closed the dialog. After restarting Windows, Busy-cursor still shown as hourglass, my new setting had no effect! When I go into the Mouse-Settings (2nd tab, „Pointer“), none of these choices matches the current cursor! – MBaas Nov 14 '17 at 16:38
  • [analyze cpu usage with WPRUI/WPA](https://superuser.com/a/1203562/174557). here you see which process has the high cpu usage (Weight %) and when you expand the stack you see what the process does – magicandre1981 Nov 14 '17 at 16:40
  • I'll do that, but I don't think that CPU-Usage is the issue (down to 5% atm) - the immutable cursor seems to be the issue... – MBaas Nov 14 '17 at 16:49
  • Ok, tried that - "Idle" gets by far the heighest Weight (86.4%) vs. CompbatTelRunner on place 2 with 3.3%. – MBaas Nov 14 '17 at 18:40
  • disable the [Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser task in Task Scheduler](https://superuser.com/a/1069212/174557) this fixes the CPU usage and your mouse pointer change. this task scans your installed software and send telemetry to Microsoft. this is hogging the CPu much that is displays the waiting glas pointer – magicandre1981 Nov 15 '17 at 15:52

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Ok, first the good news: mouse pointer reset to Normal!

Bad news: I did not do anything to achieve this! That is certainly not true, I did many things, but none of that would explain the effect:

  • as mentioned in the P.S of the question, I had disabled all Autostart-Entries. Re-enabling them had no effect.

  • further googling gave me the idea to look for driver updates. So I went to Dell's website, logged in, downloaded the glorious "DellSystemDetectLauncher" which was supposed to detect my environment. Well, that download was just the installer - which attempted to download the software from the web. It could not do that, as I was told in an error-message. For more info, I was referred to a log-file in my TMP-Folder. This file had 0 bytes length!

  • a few reboots later cursor was reset. It's an unsatisfying end to the story, I wish I has an explanation - but I ended as it started: in totally misterious ways! :(

MBaas
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