Why does my cursor change to a vertical dotted line?

[Rockbird]

It's driving me crazy, happens about 6 times a day and I can't pinpoint anything that I do to set it off. When it happens I can't type or click on anything and I have to wait about a minute for it to return to normal. I have two monitors and it seems to be since I got them.

Any clues?

Can you move it around, or does it freeze ?

USB, wireless, or hard-wired mouse ? (I sometimes have my USB mouse freeze but have not had cursor altered in the way yours is.)

Sometimes my cursor actually disappears during such a 'freeze' and I tend to put it down to me running too many things at once (on XP, here, currently running 7 Chrome browser windows, 7 other assorted windows [for windows explorer, task manager, MS-DOS windows, volume control], 2 Firefox windows, and 4 other windows [EditPad, Total Recorder, BBC iPlayer desktop]

Has not frozen so far, but if it did I would close some items. PC has 1 GB RAM, 3 GHz CPU, with 160 GB HD, 3 external (USB) 500 GB drives, DVD drives and assorted SD and other storage cards. Load all 'adds up'...

Once in a blue moon I get a message that Windows is low on virtual memory and then it grinds to a halt for a couple of minutes, but that is really unusual. I don't have freezing happen that often but if Opera or Firefox exceed 500 MB of RAM things do go downhill (see Task Manager, hit CTRL + SHIFT + ESC to start it).

Ok, more details sorry. Am on XP, usb mouse. Am only running officey stuff; a database, Office, IE etc. I can move it around but can't do anything with it.

I'll try closing some apps when it happens and see if it has any effect. Thanks.

That is a bit different to mine - normally if mine freezes it does just that and cannot be moved.

Office can be a bit of a strain (what version are you using?) - though has been years since I used Access for major projects - guy at Microsoft went quiet when I mentioned a million records... that was 10+ years ago, when 500 MB hard drives cost a small fortune (and I had 2 in that machine).

Good luck !

I Have this happening in Win7 with Word. Any guesses why? Cursor changes to vertical dotted line.