Comment 11 for bug 402892

I'm also seeing it semi-regularly in 12.10 when dropping files from nautilus (think its nautilus, gnome 3 desktop anyway) to Totem. I killed totem from the terminal and the pointer stayed like that and I couldn't click on anything else, xkill couldn't even grab the cursor to kill the file/directory-browser window.

So perhaps its not totem but the dir. browser (assuming its Nautilus on mine). Or part of the internal drag/drop mechanism in X or other clipboard handling app that dies or locks up.