After waking my PC from sleep, the wallpaper had reset and my mouse pointer started behaving strangely. My custom black-and-white cursor still appears correctly when resizing windows or selecting text, but the normal arrow becomes a much larger white pointer that looks like the default Windows cursor. Changing the pointer file in Control Panel and trying an MPO registry fix did not help. Has anyone found a way to restore the normal arrow cursor?
2 Answers
This sounds like Windows partially reset the cursor scheme after waking from sleep and is using a cached version of the default arrow. Try restarting Windows Explorer from Task Manager, then change the pointer size to something else and switch it back. Reapplying your theme under Personalization can also restore the complete cursor scheme. If that still does nothing, sign out and back in to refresh the session.
I ran into what looks like the same issue after a recent Windows update. Check Update History and see whether the newest update is responsible; uninstalling the latest update restored the cursor for me. The update identifier I saw was KB5120998, although the exact update may depend on your Windows version.
I’m trying to remove that update, but Windows won’t let me uninstall it normally. I’m hesitant to use command-line methods, so I’m still looking for another option.
I tried restarting Explorer, changing the pointer size, reapplying the theme, and signing out, but none of those fixed it. The oversized arrow still appears.