For some random reason, certain applications (chiefly wine) are restting my x cursor to an inverted colour mode where the mouse cursor is completely black and thus impossible to locate on a black console. This is obviously a bug in my X server because a call to:
xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr -fg white -bg black
and similar, makes no difference, nor does using -rv to reverse the display colours. Happily, until I get around to finding what is responsible for this, I can force it to reset by calling a script which switches cursor and then back again. If you have the same problem, try:
xsetroot -cursor_name pirate xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr
stick this somewhere and have an icon on your panel to call it.
Jon.
P.S. X annoys me, GNOME really annoys me for not making it easy to figure out what the hell it’s doing with things like mouse cursors.