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Thanks for your reply - both good thoughts , but not the solution.
It goes without saying that the cursor went invisible at a critical point in a vitally important document, and so counts as a Microsoft moment! but I have used MSWord variants daily at work, as well as at home for the last 6years or so and nothing like this has happened before.
In one instance only, I thought its absence and re-appearance might coincide with autosave, but the cursor was gone for a bit longer than it took autosave to run.
On another occasion, it disappeared and did not return, However, although I could not see it, when I moved the mouse to try to find it, I detected its presence when it passed over and egistered on the icons, so I managed to pull down the file menu and close. Re-opening the doc restored the cursor.
It has not happened since, but I have not been working on any substantial docs....this has been one of my oddest microsoft experiences. Any more thoughts anyone?
annieg