Problem setting mouse cursor theme in non-GNOME environment

[Tony Houghton <h realh co uk>]

I use and maintain ROX-Session which is a lightweight alternative to
Gnome.  I'm trying to get it to set the mouse cursor theme correctly. I
checked how gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon do it and saw
that they set the "Gtk/CursorThemeName" and "Gtk/CursorThemeSize"
xsettings. ROX-Session has an xsettings manager (in fact it's cut &
pasted from Gnome's) so I changed it to use those settings instead of
just using xrdb ("Xcursor.theme", "Xcursor.theme_core" and
"Xcursor.size").

The trouble is, although ROX-Session can now change the cursor theme on
the fly, it only effects a partial change. The standard pointer always
stays the same as it was before changing the setting (except in
iceweasel/firefox for some reason, which does pick up the theme change
immediately). The caret cursor (when hovering over a GtkEntry or
terminal) seems to get updated everywhere correctly and so do the
cursors for dragging window borders, but only if I use metacity. Openbox
keeps the original cursor theme even if I restart it.

I noticed that gnome-settings-daemon uses xrdb for the "Xcursor.*"
settings as well, but only at start-up I think, not when the settings
are changed. If I get ROX-Session to use xrdb as well as the xsettings
it does get everything to use the configured theme at start-up but not
when changing it on the fly.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk