Why do I now have two active mouse cursors, and how do I get rid of the second one?

Question

I bought a new PC yesterday, and it has a fresh install of Windows 8.1 Pro. I am now a little confused. Everything was perfect last night. I noticed there were like a billion pending Windows Updates ('cause 8.1 was released so long ago) and so I installed them all while I was sleeping.

I woke up, signed in, and went to empty the Recycle Bin. But then I noticed there was already a mouse cursor just to the left of the Recycle Bin! How did that get there?!

So basically, I have two mouse cursors on my screen. Its location never changes on the screen. But when I hover over a hyperlink - both mouse cursors change to show a hand cursor. When I click in a text field, both cursors change to indicate I am now in a text field. When the computer is loading something, both cursors change to display a Wait cursor.

So I know it's not a part of the wallpaper. Well, I knew that already anyway, but that just proves it. I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to get rid of it.

I tried searching for a solution, but all I could find were tonnes of people asking others how to get two mouse cursors, which is the opposite of what I want. I only want one. The second one's getting on my nerves. It's just sitting there in the top-left of my screen.

How do I get rid of the unwanted one? Or, why is there a second, active cursor?

Answer 1

I have resolved this issue.

I discovered that Windows thinks I have two displays. But I don't - and there has only ever been 1 display connected to this computer. So Windows screwed up somewhere and installed two different 'monitor' drivers. And so Windows thought that I had two monitors connected. One of the settings (which I did NOT set) was to "Extend the second display" which means that the screen will be extended onto the second monitor (but in this case, there's only one screen). The reason why the cursor was always at the top-left of my screen, was because Windows is set to display everything on the primary display, so, it displayed my normal cursor and then it displayed another cursor (which was meant for the extended display (second monitor)) on the primary display.

I proved this by moving my cursor outside the right of my screen. And I kept moving it. It took the same amount of moves to the left to get the cursor back into view - that proves that Windows did in fact think I had two screens and did in fact create another desktop. (But I could only see one because I only have one screen).

While changing some settings a few moments ago (unrelated), I stumbled upon a setting in PC Settings (Windows 8.1) 'Show only 1'. If you select that, it will only display one desktop regardless of how many monitors Windows thinks you have.

Setting that option essentially killed the second desktop Windows created, thus removing the duplicate cursor.

Answer 2

How I got rid of a second "phantom" pointer...

I'm running Windows 10 on an Asus T100T tablet. When I turned it on today I a second pointer had unexpectedly appeared at the top left of the display. I tried restarting the laptop and the pointer was still there. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the mouse driver. This didn't fix the problem either.

I got rid of the second pointer by using the function key which allows you to switch between PC Screen Only, Duplicated or Extended displays (f8 on my tablet). It was currently set to PC Screen Only as it should have been. I selected Duplicate instead and the second pointer immediately disappeared. I then selected PC Screen Only and the second pointer did not reappear.

Voila! A simple fix for a very annoying problem... I hope it works for others too!

Answer 3

OK, I have Windows 10 on a Lenovo 2-in-1 machine. I was cleaning the keyboard and must have triggered some hidden mode because all of a sudden I had a second pointer that appeared on a fixed location on the screen that mimicked every move my "real" pointer made. I couldn't get rid of it until I enabled tablet mode in Settings and literally dragged the ghost pointer off the screen. Not sure if this will solve the problem for others but it can't hurt to try. I must have enabled some tablet-mode setting in my zeal to get dust off the keyboard. Note to self - invest in some air canisters.