Comment 19 for bug 459647

I've had this problem in Lucid for about a week now. It started sometime during the updates to Gnome 2.30. It's exactly what other people are experiencing too: selected pointer theme is not honored when Compiz is active and the cursor is over any GTK window. Definitely a bug.

Mabawsa's workaround (setting Inherits to name of desired theme in ~/.icons/default/index.theme) works for me, although I had to adapt my icon theme (Griffin Embers Cursors) not to use any spaces in its name and directory.