Mel, I was having the same issue. In my case it only happened after opening a form. For instance, my user clicks ok at the logon, an hourglass appears, then goes away after logging on, ( you cant see this though, it happens too fast) then a form is opened, an hourglass displays and never goes away.

So the persistent hourglass is being created by the first form load after a logon.

I worked around the issue by adding:

DODEFAULT()
_screen.MousePointer=0

to my frmformcustom.backgroundrefresh

Best regards