Comment 53 for bug 459647

VLC (using Qt4-based GUI module) and other Qt4-based programs will not handle mouse cursor theme changes made in "Preferences->Appearance->Customize->Pointer" automatically. The reason is Qt deals with cursors in low level (using Xlib/Xcursor) and doesn't know anything about mouse settings stored in Gnome/GConf (even with QGtkStyle enabled).

In order to make cursor theme X-wide, one should append in ~/.Xdefaults file the line "Xcursor*theme: <your-theme-name>" and run "xrdb ~/.Xdefaults" command to store the setting server-side. Now all your Qt/Xlib/Tk/Java swing/etc programs must have the same cursor theme.

Maybe someone will want to write a patch for "gnome-appearance-properties" program to make these things transparently in more robust kind using Xlib API. Another possible way is to write patch for QGtkStyle, which could read cursor theme name from GConf and set it for application (using XcursorSetTheme), but this obviously won't heal all of the rest Xlib and Java programs.