Mouse Cursor is a Black Box...

[Hearie]

Greetings,

I installed win98se PLUS pack on a win98se machine and then installed a Garfield theme. When the mouse cursor would be over a hyperlink, the cursor would change into just a solid black cursor box. I uninstalled the Theme and set all the mouse cursors back to default settings. Now the mouse in always just a black little box. When I change the color settings to 256(from 16bit) the mouse cursor appears normally, when I change it back to 16bit it turns into a black box again. I now am running it with mouse trails turned on at thier lowest setting and the mouse cursor is normal(except for an annoying short tail...) Anyways, how do I fix this? I ran sfc looking for corrupt files but didn't fins any, I reinstalled win98 and that still didn't fix prob. Any Ideas? Thanx.

Bryan

[rangeral]

Try reinstalling your mobo drivers then the video drives since you reinstalled 98 might as well finish it off see if it helps especially when your lower resolution fixes it.

[Hearie]

Ok, tried it but no luck. Was worth the try though, I was hopeful...

[rangeral]

Did you restart yet? D/l tweakui and select repair icons, you can find it at any download site, worth another shot.

[Hearie]

Tried the TweakUI repair EVERYTHING...but still no luck. Also the mouse trails checked no longer makes the cursor icon viewable, now I can only see the cursor in 16 colors. I can't figure this one out. Any more Ideas I am willng to try. Its that or format. Thnx

Bryan

[Hearie]

I changed the mouse cursor icons to large icons, and now I am back to stage one. The cursor works just great until I put it over a hyperlink, then it changes to a black box. I tried changing it back to standard size mouse icons but that made it the black box all the time. I am going to stay with the large icons and the annoyance of the black box over the hyperlinks but if anyone has anymore ideas....Thnx.

Bryan

[rangeral]

Restart in msdos mode at the prompt type scanreg /fix , maybe a little more kicking around will make something happen, sounds like your almost there.

Also try reinstalling plus or uninstalling for the moment, your call.

[ukulele]

Try this. Go to Control Panel/Mouse/Pointers and reselect the default pointers. Click Apply and exit. If it still doesn't work then you have corrupted the default mouse icons. At this point I would restore the entire drive image, but, I keep an updated backup. Little annoyances like this are another good reason to have two drives. If you don't have backup you need to research the file names of the default icons, copy them somewhere and restore them.

Oh, in case I forget, keep your computer away from junk food.

[Hearie]

The icon that seems to be bad is the "hand" that the cursor turns into when you put the cursor over a hyperlink. I could live with this annouance, but last night when I went into Photoshop, the black box showed up there. It wsa fine until I put the cursor over a picture In am editing, then the little black box thing showed back up. So the black box shows up when over a link and in photoshop when I put the mouse cursor over a picture to edit. I believe that both those situations use the little "hand" cursor at those moments. I am going to try the scanreg /fix next.

ukulele; Tried setting default mouse icons setting thing last night and that didn't fix it. But I think your right when you mention corrupted files. Now to try and restore them. I tried reinstalling win98(twice) and that doesn't do it.

Just tried putting the Hand-l.cur as default pointer and that black box showed up. Sooo how/where do I find that particular file(hand-l.cur) and replace it? Thnx.

Bryan

[Hearie]

grrrr...well it isn't the hand-l.cur file, replaced that and still no luck. I tried fixing the registry in DOS mode but didn't do the trick either. Uke; I don't have a backup image...my bad.

[rockinmale]

I dont know if this will shed any light on the situation, but i'll give it a try. Let's take a look into your registry. I have fired up my 98se to cross reference your reg to mine.

First under hkey_classes_root
under *.cur
It should have a default name with a "curfile" as the data

next under Hkey_users/control panel/cursors
Under name i have
Default / (value not set)
animated hourglass ",,c:\windows\cursors\appstart.ani, c:\windows\cursors
windows standard ",,,,,,,,,,,,,"

Also hkey_local_machine software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/setup/optionalcomponents/cursors

default / value not set
inf / shell3.inf
installed / 0
section / cursors


Take a look and see if it matches to mine......

Just a reminder
Before changing any values understand that it can hose your system if done incorrectly.

I hope the info help.....
Good luck!
rockinmale

[ukulele]

Originally posted by Hearie
The icon that seems to be bad is the "hand" that the cursor turns into when you put the cursor over a hyperlink. I could live with this annouance, but last night when I went into Photoshop, the black box showed up there. It wsa fine until I put the cursor over a picture In am editing, then the little black box thing showed back up. So the black box shows up when over a link and in photoshop when I put the mouse cursor over a picture to edit. I believe that both those situations use the little "hand" cursor at those moments. I am going to try the scanreg /fix next.

ukulele; Tried setting default mouse icons setting thing last night and that didn't fix it. But I think your right when you mention corrupted files. Now to try and restore them. I tried reinstalling win98(twice) and that doesn't do it.

Just tried putting the Hand-l.cur as default pointer and that black box showed up. Sooo how/where do I find that particular file(hand-l.cur) and replace it? Thnx.



Bryan

Bryan, I searched my computer for any files that started with HAND and can't find any at all. It is also not a curser (*.cur) file or animated curser (*.ani) file that I can find. It is obviously a integrated file in explorer but I don't know how it is called up. If reinstalling windows on top of itself won't fix it then your only solution is to install to a new directory or format and start over. Before you give up though, do a thorough search in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for a possible easy fix.

[AllGamer]

Win98

how much ram do you have?

make sure you have enough say 256 Meg

check uninstall mouse drivers

install latest mouse drivers

uninstall video drivers

install newest video drivers

first test in Safe Mode

then in normal mode but 256 color

then switch to normal mode with 16 bit colors



and use MSCONFIG to kill everything in the StartUp

[ukulele]

Win98 runs just fine with 32MB ram. The problem is really very simple. A file was changed or corrupted that was the graphic for the curser. Figure out what file that is and replace it. It has nothing to do with video drivers or mouse drivers. The problem with programs like Windows Plus is it modifies fundamental aspects of Explorer all for the sake of eyecandy. Again, look it up on the MKB. You might even be able to repair it by reinstalling Win Plus and reverting back to the default skin with that program.

[Hearie]

I finally gave up and formatted...

I still don't know what caused this. I did a thorough search in Microsifts Knowledge base and found nothing about the problem I was having. A few came close and I tried their fixes(mostly reinstalling video drivers) I tried alot of different things but nothing worked. The only thing that was queer after I formatted and reinstalled was that my original graphics adapter wouldn't work anymore...I would install it and then after rebooting almost immediatley crash. Error message read something like:

blah blah crash in OE at 0317:0000663B

Same address everytime too. I had to download a new graphics driver and then it worked fine. Thnx for all the help guys. SAlthough I still wish I knew what caused this all in the first place.

AllGamer;
Running 192MB RAM and tried all the things you said except uninstalling mouse drivers(I removed the mouse from device manager, but that didn't really unistall it).

BUT at least its back up!

Bryan