Restore original Win7 default cursors

[Bob]

Not sure what transpired, but the cursor on a Win7 desktop got
changed,

The original cursor: Arrow was medium tone white with black outline.
Edit cursor was dark "I".

This changed to: Arrow VERY bright distracting white with black
outline. Edit cursor and others are now "Ex-Or'd", which means that
their color changes according to what's under them. Unfortunately,
that's not a practical thing to do, as it often completely disappears.
Going to the main "Change Mouse Pointers" menu and clicking "use
default" does not fix it. Nor does reselecting the regular Aero
mouse-pointer scheme. Nor does changing to another desktop theme
restore it.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Jeff Layman]

Not sure what transpired, but the cursor on a Win7 desktop got
changed,

The original cursor: Arrow was medium tone white with black outline.
Edit cursor was dark "I".

This changed to: Arrow VERY bright distracting white with black
outline. Edit cursor and others are now "Ex-Or'd", which means that
their color changes according to what's under them. Unfortunately,
that's not a practical thing to do, as it often completely disappears.
Going to the main "Change Mouse Pointers" menu and clicking "use
default" does not fix it. Nor does reselecting the regular Aero
mouse-pointer scheme. Nor does changing to another desktop theme
restore it.

Anyone have any ideas?

See:
http://www.w7forums.com/change-windows-default-cursor-scheme-permanantly-t11553.html

If that doesn't help, might be worth seeing what programs run at
startup, and/or what processes/services are running which might be
responsible for a custom cursor.

What happens in safe mode?

 

[Paul in Houston TX]

Not sure what transpired, but the cursor on a Win7 desktop got
changed,

The original cursor: Arrow was medium tone white with black outline.
Edit cursor was dark "I".

This changed to: Arrow VERY bright distracting white with black
outline. Edit cursor and others are now "Ex-Or'd", which means that
their color changes according to what's under them. Unfortunately,
that's not a practical thing to do, as it often completely disappears.
Going to the main "Change Mouse Pointers" menu and clicking "use
default" does not fix it. Nor does reselecting the regular Aero
mouse-pointer scheme. Nor does changing to another desktop theme
restore it.

Anyone have any ideas?

It sound like you turned on the visually impaired enhancement.
Toggle Alt + left shift + print screen and see.

 

[Bob]

See:
http://www.w7forums.com/change-windows-default-cursor-scheme-permanantly-t11553.html

If that doesn't help, might be worth seeing what programs run at
startup, and/or what processes/services are running which might be
responsible for a custom cursor.

What happens in safe mode?

Thanks to you and Paul for the replies. This was a strange one. After
a few reboots, it went away, hopefully forever. I can't think of
anything that I did in the interim that would have fixed it, so I'm
assuming that it was an odd OS bug that corrupted the cursor handling
function.

I notice that the regular cursor is also ExOr'd (so it changes color
depending on the color of the underlying pixels), but the bug
evidently changed the ExOr byte so the final value was often
invisible.