Comment 102 for bug 459647

I've been following this bug since Lucid, which was when I noticed this behaviour. Not sure if this helps, but this is how I worked-around the same behaviour under Compiz on Arch (see the last comment):

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/18923

Basically I was getting the ugly black X pointer when performing certain actions like dragging a Firefox tab, however it seems the mouse theme has more to do with it than any code fix (even though Compiz still might be at fault).

To be totally honest, I set my themes / pointers etc up to emulate Jaunty and it worked. I'm not saying that it's not a stupid Compiz bug, but this is how you can work around it if you're ok with some of your pointers being from a base cursor theme that is better looking than the black X theme.