# The disappearing mouse pointer RESOLVED



## b_elliott (Mar 20, 2022)

EDIT: After trying all suggested fixes, turns out the Dell USB mouse had to be replaced. It was a hardware issue all along. 5 year old mouse at that!

More and more over the past months I have run into my mouse cursor disappear inside Reaper or inside Windows apps. 

Situation: The cursor once moved or clicked sometimes disappears. A warning sound in made. It recovers normally after 5 seconds. Sometimes it doesn't so I have to disconnect the USB mouse, then reconnect to have it recover.

Actions I have taken on my Windows10 Dell* old pc to remedy include:
- verifying mouse driver OK - done
- updating USB driver - done
- switch the mouse USB connection from the back of pc tower to an unused port in front - done

It is not Reaper, nor the new Plugin Alliance, or ToneBooster plugins as the mouse will disappear in VLC Player as well.

Thought I would ask, in case someone had a similar experience, but resolved it.
Best, Bill

pc specs:
WINDOWS10 on a DELL XPS 8700
INTEL i7-4770 @3.40GHz
1TB ssd Crucial MX500; 24GB RAM


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## liquidlino (Mar 20, 2022)

Mine disappears too in reaper once in a while. I don't get a warning sound though. It's infrequent enough that I've never bothered diagnosing it. Same thing, after a few seconds it reappears. I've always assumed some part of reaper is accidentally invoking mouse.hide(), like when games hide the cursor. Or maybe a plugin. 

Trick with these things is to start noting what's onscreen when it happens, and spotting commonalities, like "it always seems to happen when I've got XYZ plugin window showing" etc.


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## b_elliott (Mar 20, 2022)

That's a helpful tip. 
I noticed my other system (laptop Win10) has no mouse issues; rather can take up to a minute for an app to load. 
Seems the older I get, the more impatient. lol


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## Dietz (Mar 20, 2022)

I think I have found the perfect solution to prevent a mouse from disappearing:


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## composerguy78 (Mar 20, 2022)

I have found this also in reaper - I found it only did so in using certain color themes. I find the default ones give me no issues so I’m sticking with those!


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## b_elliott (Mar 22, 2022)

composerguy78 said:


> I have found this also in reaper - I found it only did so in using certain color themes. I find the default ones give me no issues so I’m sticking with those!


I switched back to the default theme. Over the past few days not as bad = that's good.
Then today I lost the mouse cursor big time and had to ctl-alt-del the session. The cause was Audio Damage Rough Rider 2 (one of their retired unsupported vst2 freebies). I ended up deleting that plugin and updating to AD's Rough Rider 3 (also free) which is vst3 and works perfectly inside Reaper. 
Likely there are other broken vsts to watch for & ditch, especially the freebie unsupported vsts I've recently DLed.
Hopefully these two actions can simmer things down for my mousey.





Cheers, Bill


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## cedricm (Mar 23, 2022)

A few settings might mitigate the issue:
- Enable Mouse cursor trail
- Enable pointer shadow
- Disable Hide Poiinter while Tyyping
- Show cursor position shortcut (by default CTRL)
- Also a trick used for video games: change the cursor color to one rarely used color, such as Magenta.

You may also want to try to change the pointer and back again in case the configuration was corrupted.


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## b_elliott (Mar 23, 2022)

cedricm said:


> A few settings might mitigate the issue:
> - Enable Mouse cursor trail
> - Enable pointer shadow
> - Disable Hide Poiinter while Tyyping
> ...


Useful. I now rock a magenta pointer amongst other tweaks.
Thank you.


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