Changing cursor colour in Windows XP

[Bert Nobbins]

Back in the old days of Windows 3.1, I had a nifty little program that changed the pointing cursor to any colour you liked. Bright red was my choice as it stood out nicely in most cases.

Is there a way to do that in XP? I have looked at lots of free offerings on the Web, but have yet to find a simple colour-change of the standard pointer.
The Control Panel->Mouse->Pointers options doesn't have what I want.

I know (or think I know) the cursor is a .ICO file- can I edit it in Paintshop, or will that turn my computer into a smouldering ruin? I'd have to find it first, of course, and having just run a *.ICO search on the whole hard disk, I haven't found the collection of Windows system pointers I was expecting.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[MrSquishy]

I think they call them .cur files now. Whether or not you can just edit them in Paintshop, I don't know.

[Gus Gusterson]

Yes, they are .cur files. You can find them in c:\windows\cursors. I believe you can edit them in PaintShop Pro.

[Bert Nobbins]

Ah yes, got the little buggers.

(pause)

I know have a nice red pointer cursor!

I quickly found however that my ancient (but much-loved) copy of Paintshop 5 does not recognise the .cur format. So I looked for a cursor editor, and there is a nice little free one called JustCursors, which I got from http://www.download.com/JustCursors/...-10406297.html

Here is what you do:

1) Copy arrow_m.cur (the standard white pointer) from /WINDOWS/cursors into a temp folder

2) Open in JustCursors. Fill with red. Save as redarrow_m.cur

3) Put it in /WINDOWS/cursors

4) Go to contol panel->mouse->pointers and Browse until you find redarrow_m.cur and select it. Job done

Thank you everyone; ignorance not just fought but dragged down an alley and given a stiff kicking.