Control key not highlighting the cursor

Question

Control key not highlighting the cursor

Jason Crawford 5

I have my Windows11 configured so that if I hit the CTRL key, a circle briefly appears where the mouse pointer is. This allows me to quickly spot the mouse pointer.

But starting a few weeks ago, this stopped working. After doing some testing, I've determined that it does still work immediately after a reboot, but very quickly stops working. I've not been able to determine what is causing this to stop working.

How can I make this work consistently?

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Jason Crawford 5 Reputation points

2025-03-11T14:05:13.1166667+00:00

My current hypothesis seems likely.

Each time I reboot my Windows laptops or if the screen goes to sleep, I tap on the CTRL key to encourage Windows to offer me the pin prompt or to simply wake up. But with this laptop, when I'm at home, I use a USB keyboard connected through a USB hub in a Phillips monitor and back to my laptop over USBC. That USBC connection is also a PD connection that charges my laptop.

If I tap on the CTRL key of the laptop, instead of the USB keyboard, I believe the problem doesn't occur.

I believe during these reboots at home, the monitor is a bit confused whether it needs to be on or off. As a result, I believe not all of my keystrokes reach the laptop. This might be confusing Windows11. Windows11 rarely recovers from this confusion enough to support the CTRL tap pointer visibility function.

This is my leading hypothesis.

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Jason Crawford 5 Reputation points

2025-03-11T14:05:13.1166667+00:00

My current hypothesis seems likely.

Each time I reboot my Windows laptops or if the screen goes to sleep, I tap on the CTRL key to encourage Windows to offer me the pin prompt or to simply wake up. But with this laptop, when I'm at home, I use a USB keyboard connected through a USB hub in a Phillips monitor and back to my laptop over USBC. That USBC connection is also a PD connection that charges my laptop.

If I tap on the CTRL key of the laptop, instead of the USB keyboard, I believe the problem doesn't occur.

I believe during these reboots at home, the monitor is a bit confused whether it needs to be on or off. As a result, I believe not all of my keystrokes reach the laptop. This might be confusing Windows11. Windows11 rarely recovers from this confusion enough to support the CTRL tap pointer visibility function.

This is my leading hypothesis.

Answer 1

Anonymous

Hello Jason Crawford,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

First, let's make sure that the setting is still enabled: Go to Settings > Devices > Mouse > Additional mouse options. In the Mouse Properties window, go to the Pointer Options tab and ensure that "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key" is checked.

Since you've mentioned that it works immediately after a reboot but stops working soon after, it might be related to a background process or application interfering with this feature. Here are a few steps to try:

Ensure that your mouse drivers are up to date. You can check for updates in the Device Manager by right-clicking on your mouse and selecting "Update driver."
Some applications might interfere with mouse settings. Try closing unnecessary background applications one by one to see if the issue persists.
Make sure your Windows 11 is up to date. Sometimes, updates can fix bugs and improve system stability. Go to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and check for updates.
Corrupted system files might cause issues. Open Command Prompt as an administrator and run the command sfc /scannow. This will scan and repair any corrupted system files.
Run a full system scan using Windows Defender or any other antivirus software to ensure that there are no malware or viruses causing the issue.

I hope the information above is helpful.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

Best Regards,

Daisy Zhou

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Jason Crawford 5 Reputation points

2025-03-11T04:32:21.6933333+00:00

Daisy. Thanks for the suggestions. None of those helped, but after a bit of experimenting, I have a hypothesis that seems correct.

At home I have a USB keyboard, connected to a monitor which is connected to the laptop via USBC. During the boot process, once Windows appears, I tap the CTRL key on that keyboard to tell Windows to offer me the pin prompt. I stop tapping the CTRL key once Windows seems ready to accept my pin.

At boot up, if I tap on the ctrl key of the laptop, rather than the usb keyboard, I think the problem does not occur.

What might contribute to this is that during reboot, the Phillips monitor, that is acting as a USB hub and as a charger for the laptop, often seems confused at first as to whether it should be activated or not. This probably means that only a subset of the CTRL key taps arrives at the laptop. And perhaps that leaves Windows in a bad state when it wants to track the tapping of the CTRL key.
Erik Schorr 0 Reputation points

2025-05-11T00:58:28.91+00:00

Daisy, your answer is very unhelpful. None of the suggestions you listed have anything to do with keyboard shortcuts, finding programs that capture specific keystrokes (like they way a screen capture program would register "Ctrl+F11" to trigger a screen capture, for example), nor keyboard/mouse accessibility (er, microsoft now refers to it as "ease of access") features.

This person's problem affects me, as well, on two systems, both Windows 10 Pro and Windows 11 Pro. Drivers, system scan, sfc, etc, have no effect. None of your suggestions lead to actually figuring out and addressing the root cause of the problem, and without a true investigative effort, a fix by reinstalling drivers, system scan, and the like, will merely be temporary, until the windows system decides to "forget" about the [Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key] mouse pointer option.

This is a great example of "Correlation is not causation". We need to address the cause, not the things correlated with the symptoms.

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Control key not highlighting the cursor

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