Thank you @IainB, for the pointers.  :) I'm thinking it's not a mouse issue at the root cause for some reason, since when it is changing to the Wait cursor I'm unable to click anything (often-times even with a Wait cursor, Windows will still let me click something). Just a hunch, though I could be wrong.

@SkyWire, I was thinking the same about it possibly not being possible, but thought I'd ask anyway in case anyone else knew something that I don't. Maybe a Super-Mega-Grand-Poobah-Guru would've known some super sneaky and clever way to do this, lol.

I did have this problem for a while now; but, I recently upgraded my motherboard, ram and cpu, and it seems to be even more so than when it was happening on my last mobo/ram/cpu. I have just been watching my processes with taskmanager, and noticed a dllhost.exe constantly opening and closing, which made me raise an eyebrow. I looked at it's command-line and it's to C:\Windows\system32\DllHost.exe /Processid:{AB8902B4-09CA-4BB6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}.

Looking in the registry at that CLSID it points to thumbcache.dll. I'm wondering if this could be the root cause?