How do I disable the small pen cursor in Windows 7?

Question

I have a Windows 7 machine running a touch-driven application, and whenever a user touches the screen, this small diamond shaped cursor appears. I believe the cursor is intended for pen and tablet use.

I tried disabling the Tablet PC Input service, but then touch stopped working on the machine entirely. I then thought perhaps I could change the cursor appearance, but I've not be able to find any trace of it.

Is there anyway to simply hide that cursor entirely, so there is no visual feedback besides the application?

Answer 1

I know this was asked a while back, but figured I would post this in case people are still searching for a solution. I needed to disable the touch cursor in a kiosk-type setting so as not to distract from the running application.

Open the registry editor (open start menu, type "regedit" in the search bar, hit enter) and navigate to:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Pen\SysEventParameters

There is an entry called "UICursorMode", change it's value to 0. (Right-click, choose "Modify", change "Value data" to 0, click ok) Close the registry editor and restart the computer.

At this point whenever you touch the screen it places the mouse cursor right where you touched instead of displaying the small diamond cursor. In my application I did not need users interacting with the mouse cursor at all so I replaced the standard Windows mouse cursor with an invisible one, and at that point everything looks just like it would using a standard tablet.

This may not be satisfactory to everyone who might need both touch and a mouse cursor, but it is the best I have been able to find so far.

Hope this helps!