Weird problem: A friend of mine recently did a system recovery for his Gateway 3040GZ (windows xp) and I'm not sure why or how he arrived at this point but he deleted the C: partition...so with the hard drive completely wiped out I advised him to insert the system recovery discs he made when he first purchased the notebook and boot from CD. This went fine, and the notebook ran once again but obviously without anything installed except basic windows components and generic drivers that weren't exactly right. So we went to support.gateway and got all the right drivers (after installing McAffee and turning on the firewall, etc., of course) and now the thing runs like a champ. Better than before, even, because all the useless factory installed programs are gone and we only got back the ones we needed.

Here is the one, small, but absolutely annoying issue: when you point the cursor in a text box online or anywhere in windows (word is actually not affected by this issue at all) you don't see the skinny "I" shaped, blinking text cursor. You get a large black box that is annoying and makes it difficult to type and highlight and really hard to just put the cursor right between two non-spaced characters. Also, when you highlight text in these scenarios, the highlight color is blue, not the usual black. I'm staring at this awful blinking black box (say that three times fast) right now, please help!

So far from Googling this around I have found the following suggestions, to no avail: change the settings in the mouse settings under "pointers" (I have a synaptics touchpad v5.9 and none of the settings apply to this or have any effect), hit the "insert key" because you're in overwrite mode (I'm not, and I think that applies to word anyway...the one place I don't have this problem), and do a system recovery, which has already been done. The keyboard driver is a "Standard 101/102 key or microsoft natural PS/2/Keyboard" and this is one of the drivers installed during the recovery. Gateway lists no keyboard driver for this laptop model and I have a feeling that the one he has on here is wrong or doesn't need to be here at all (can the synaptics driver "drive" both the mouse and keyboard?). I ran the driver guide toolkit and it didn't even detect the keyboard driver. Tried uninstalling said driver but it was reinstalled automatically. Please help!

Try this...

Go to the Device Manager and delete the Mouse.

Now, since you now have no Mouse, do a <Ctrl><Alt><Delete> to reboot.
This will cause Windows to see new hardware (the Mouse) and reload the Mouse drivers.

Good Luck...

I had already tried this fix before, to no avail, but I tried it again anyway and still no luck. I should mention that the whole "black box" cursor thing and the text being highlighted in blue reminds me of when you're in DOS, like as if you were typing something at C: prompt. Please keep the suggestions rolling in, this problem is difficult to google because everyone reads "cursor" as mouse pointer so I usually get fixes for mouse pointer problems and those are not working. Thanks.

I have to make this look hard for the boss...
Ok, next try this...

1. Right click on the desktop
2. Select properties
3. Check the Themes tab

See if that has something to do with it.
A change of theme might help.
You can alway change back later.

Good Luck...

Yeah, I heard that one! Unfortunately, this one didn't work either. Some tips I found while googling pointed me in this direction so I played around with many of the "appearance" and "theme" settings hoping that the problem wouldn't survive the changes but it does every time. Thanks again for your help, I'll check back soon.

Ok, one more thing to try...
Going to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Accessibility Options.
Click on the Display tab, then adjust the Cursor Width slider to the left or right.

Hope this works for you...if this doesn't do it, I'll let someone else have a go at it.

Sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and more importantly...YOU ARE RIGHT!!! This fix worked, thank you so much!!!! I had no idea this even existed in accessibility options...as a matter of fact, it's probably the one aspect of control panel I have little to no experience with. Not only is the regular skinny cursor back, the highlight color is back to black instead of blue when you highlight text. I really appreciate this, my friend will be psyched when I give him the news and return this machine to him!