Cursor disappears when using second account

I've got a problem with my cursor disappearing when I switch from one Windows account to another. The older account got set up this past Christmas when I got the computer and the newer one got set up a couple of weeks ago. I had no problem with either account until today: now, suddenly, I'm finding that when I switch to the newer account, the cursor just flat-out disappears and doesn't come back for love or money. This leaves me unable to do very much of anything except switch back to the older account, where my cursor usually reappears. But as soon as I go back to the newer account, I've lost the cursor and can't make it come back.

For months now, I've been frustrated by the apparent oversensivity of the gesture interpretation on the touchpad. I innocently move a finger along the touchpad to get it from A to B and find that it gets interpreted as a wish to scroll or bring up a context menu or whatever. So yesterday, I disabled all but the single-finger gestures. The problem seems to have begun right after that. After various reboots and other experiments to get my cursor back on the newer account, I finally decided to re-enable the gestures as they had been on the theory that perhaps that was causing my cursor problems. But it didn't really help so maybe that was NOT the problem after all.

Can anyone suggest a way to keep my cursor from disappearing in the second Windows account? And if you know how to keep the touchpad from reacting to every minute movement and interpreting it is an attempted-gesture when it is just me moving my hand, I'd love to hear about that too.

I'm not sure if I have a driver issue or something of that kind.

The laptop is an ASUS K55N, which was new at Christmas 2012. It was purchased from Best Buy.

Some things you can try:

If you have a USB mouse, plug that in and see if that works the same way on the second account.

You can adjust the sensitivity of the touchpad but that may be a 3rd-party adjustment if using 3rd-party software.

You may be able to adjust the touchpad and mouse sensitivity by going to Control Panel> Mouse> and reviewing the options.

One other thing you could try is to enable the locate pointer option when CTRL is depressed. Maybe you can find it easier?



Seems like your over sensitivity issue and lost pointer issue might be somehow tied together. Good luck.

An additional thought:

You might also want to check that the "Snap to" option is not set:

Unfortunately, the steps above haven't been very helpful. After enabling the CTRL key to tell me where the cursor was, the cursor stayed visible when I signed on to the newer account. However, it was immediately frozen and I couldn't figure out any way to get it to move again so I signed out of the newer account and back to the older account to compose this.

Why would the cursor freeze like that? What do I need to do to keep it from freezing? The second account is useless if I can't do anything due to a frozen cursor.

Hi RhinoCan,

Well, I guess the good news is you found the cursor and the bad news is it doesn't work! I have no idea why that cursor is behaving like that in the second account only. Maybe there is some sort of corruption at play? Any chance you can delete that second account and try to create a new one again? These two tutorials should help:

User Account - Delete - Windows 7 Help Forums

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/5536-user-account-add-new-user-windows-8-a.html

I would suggest you follow the steps in each tutorial carefully and I am sure that Brink (or someone else) may lend a hand if you run into a snag in those areas. Give it a whirl and let us know. Good luck.

I'm really not sure why it made a difference but I created a new account and deleted the one in which the cursor had started disappearing (or freezing when it was visible) and now both the old account and the one I created yesterday are working fine. I doubt I ever would have tried that on my own since I see no reason for an account that was working fine for a couple of weeks to start having cursor issues. But I can't argue with the facts: the new account works fine. Any idea WHY I had this odd behaviour?

Hi RhinoCan,

That's great news. Glad you got it fixed. I (personally) have no idea how that happened but I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it unless the problem crops up again. What you did was sort of "wipe the slate clean" if you will, and in doing so, it took the bad chalk mark with it. Good luck.