gschem: black pointer on black background

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello everyone.
I have a problem too strange for googling, at least I can't figure out
how to phrase it.

Recently I've been using gschem, the open-source schematic capture
program.  It definitely has its issues, but the price is right. :=) For
the most part it works well, and I have learned to work around its
problems.  But this particular problem is driving me crazy.

First of all, the gschem program appears to only support a black
background with little white dots for grid lines.  I hate this but there
seems to be no way to change it so I tolerate it.  But after using
gschem for some time - sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes 4 hours - my
mouse pointer suddenly changes.  The white outline on the black arrow
disappears, and the pointer becomes entirely black.  For most
applications this is no problem.  But on the black background of gschem,
I can only see the pointer when it eclipses a component - TOTALLY
unacceptable!  I did go into my desktop preferences and set the
pointer-finder  option which does a little concentric-box animation when
you press the control key - but this doesn't make things much more
convenient, as gschem requires you to be quite precise in grabbing
components and lines for moving, connecting, etc.  Now sometimes the
mutant black cursor will return to normal after I exit gschem and I can
restart the  program and the pointer will be OK for a while.  Other
times I have to log out of my session and restart X.  This would not be
a big deal if the cursor didn't decide to change itself back every 15
minutes or so, which it is quite capable of doing.

I looked into changing the cursor.  I tried installing gcursor, which
can supposedly change the cursor colors to inverse, but it does not
affect my mutant black cursor.

Does anybody know a good, simple way to override the cursor color? 
(This is Centos, a clone of RHEL, so I'm not actually sure if I've got
Gnome or KDE - probably it's some weird hybrid. :-) And, no, I will not
change the distro, I need it to be Centos for one of my projects.) 
Also, if any of you have used gschem, is there a way to make it change
its background color?

Thanks!

Vaughn