Getting rid of annoying mouse cursor recycling symbol
 

I am running Fedora Core 1 and Gnome 2.4. The mouse cursor changes when it is moved around to different windows or when certain click operations have been accomplished (e.g. arrow, text cursor, arrow with hourglass, hand-with-finger-ready-to-click, etc.), which is all fine, but in some cases the cursor changes to a very large and annoying recycling symbol (three fat bent arrows arranged in a triangle), where it isn't clear where one points and clicks, and which obscures a lot of stuff below it. This happens sometimes when I run xemacs, and it happens a lot with xfig. I am not sure whether this is a gnome issue, an X windows issue or what else. How does one control the behavior of the mouse cursor shape? I tried selecting different themes within Gnome, but the behavior was the same everywhere. I tried KDE, and the problem didn't happen there (but I'd really like to stick with Gnome, so I'd like to solve this somehow). I looked for a mouse configuration utility, but all I can do there is change the speed sensitivity, or make it left handed, or the like. The Gnome help system claims that basic preferences can be set by selecting various things within some Desktop Preferences Menu, which I can't locate anywhere. I looked around for Gnome configuration files in the various /etc/gconf directories, but didn't see anything obvious I could fiddle with to change the mouse cursor type, or force it to always stay an arrow, or force it to never turn into a large recycling symbol.

Has anyone else run into this? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!