Animated Cursors stop working

Have been looking into the cause of why my mouse cursor animations do not work.

Dell Studio 1537 running Vista Ultimate with Alps Touchpad 7.2.101.211, A03.

When logging in the animated circle and pointer works (i.e. it goes around and around) but during logon the animation stops.

I knew it had to be something loading up causing the problem so I watched carefully and noticed that when the Alps touchpad icon appeared, near to the clock, the cursor animation would stop.

As a result, I changed the 'Normal Select' pointer to an animated cursor which made it easier to notice the problem straight away. I killed the 'Apoint.exe' process and reapplied the 'pointer shadow'. Hey presto, the animation kept going and going.

I reloaded Apoint.exe and the animation was still going BUT once I moved the cursor it stopped.

In short, the cause is Apoint or the drivers it executes. Tried looking for updated drivers but I have the most recent which Dell supply. Perhaps the manufacturer has newer versions?

Not sure what else to try. Has anyone know if this issue has been reported to Dell?

I'm guessing here but the Alps software does change the cursor icons when you go to scroll up and down. I wonder if this mechanism is somehow conflicting with Vista's own control of displaying the correct cursor icon?

I've checked and the cursor icons Vista uses when you scroll up and down are not the same so I can only guess the Alps software is overriding this. There is no GUI option to switch this off and the registry settings are not that descriptive.

 

For those that are affected by this issue I have a solution which works for me.

I was right that the Alps software is causing the problem. When you scroll up and down, zoom in or out and use circular motions the software will override the pointer icon and display it's own custom pointer.

This shouldn't be an issue but obviously there is a fault because it's stopping animated cursors working.

Disabling these custom pointers requires you to edit the settings stored within the registry. There is no option I could find in the GUI.

First I killed the 'Apoint.exe' process to ensure the changes I made were not undone when the process closed gracefully.

Within HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE look for 'Alps' found under the Software keys.

Export these settings first to keep as backup. Reinstalling the drivers and software should also recreate these.


Look for the setting 'ChangeCursorType'. Either rename to 'Old-ChangeCursorType' or change the value to '0'.


Within LOCAL_MACHINE you'll notice 'Alps - Apoint' and 'Alps - Apoint_Default'.

Ensure to make the change to ALL of these keys otherwise the software could reset itself to defaults.

Restart Windows and now your animated cursors should continue to 'animate' !

When you scroll, zoom etc... the pointer will not change (or at least it shouldn't). We've taken this ability away from the Alps software. Hopefully we can undo all these changes when Dell release a fix. Personally I prefer to have the cursor animation working.

Hope this helps