God bless Microsoft.

My wonderful wife was invited to display a selection of her glass pieces at someone else's house on Sunday. Before she left, I quickly burned a DVD with a couple hundred pictures of her work. The disk played beautifully in Windows Media Center on our laptop. But as with many things Microsoft, there was a glitch: As soon as the show began, the cursor disappeared and could not be brought back, which meant that there was no convenient way to pause the show or stop the program.

Google to the rescue! Searching for windows media center cursor invisible slide show quickly led me to a discussion in which jonhall99 wrote:

I had the same problem until I turned off "Display pointer trails" in "Mouse
Properties - Pointer Options" then my invisible pointer returned.

Problem solved. Thank you, Google. Thank you, johnhall99. But, um, Microsoft, I really wish you hadn't made me spend 15 minutes of a pretty busy morning trying to figure this out.