No mouse cursor in {flux|open}box until an application is opened

[Scott Robbins]

A recent fresh install of F10 from DVD seemed normal enough.  Gnome and
KDE boot normally, everything is fine. 
However, I prefer fluxbox.  I installed it afterwards, but when I type
startx, there is no mouse cursor.  This is on an Acer Aspire 4720z,
which uses the synaptics driver.  The older Fedora versions have that
entry in xorg.conf on this machine.  The later Rawhide test installs
don't have an xorg.conf, of course, but it worked fine with them as
well.  

If I right click on the desktop, a context menu opens, which is normal
behavior.  However, still no cursor.   I can navigate the menu with the
invisible cursor. 
Now, when I open an application, xterm, firefox or whatever, if I drag
the mouse back and forth into the application once or twice and left
click, a cursor appears.  
That's in fluxbox. 

In openbox, the same behavior occurs with an xterm.  However, if I open
a gtk app, such as firefox or gnome-terminal (again, I can open them by
left clicking the as yet invisible mouse) the cursor just appears,
usually with that little blue moving circle that one sees when first
logging into a Gnome desktop. 

Putting a working rawhide install's xorg.conf in there didn't help.
Dmesg and Xorg logs show the same thing as a working installation's
logs, seeing a synaptics mouse on boot and upon starting xorg, Mac mouse
emulation.

Other things I've tried, after googling and seeing various mouse
problems--(though none were desktop specific, in those cases, the poster
seemed to not have a mouse at all) were removing rhgb quiet from the
grub line (apparently helps with some nvidia cards), adding HWCursor off
to xorg.conf, installing config-system-display and using it.  None of
these help. 

It's more an amusing inconvenience than disaster, since, A) the cursor
does appear after anything is opened, and B) the whole reason I prefer
the *box WM's is because they enable to do almost everything without the
mouse. 

I was able to duplicate this on two test installs, but I've only tried
on this one machine, an Acer 4720z, which has frequently given me Just
Me(TM) problems.  

Using gpm also works without problem, so the system is seeing the mouse,
Gnome and KDE see the mouse, it's just that the *box WM's seem to not
notice there's a mouse till an application opens. 

Has anyone run into something like this?  I'm not sure what Gnome and
KDE are doing that fluxbox isn't in this case.  


Thanks for any input.  

I also tried, on the second test install, upgrading the existing F10
releaes to today's rawhide, but there was no change. 


-- 
Scott Robbins
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