What I got for Christmas: sufficiently advanced Intel graphics drivers for 855GM, in Linux 2.6.37-rc7. No more missing mouse cursor on boot (and, icing on the Christmas cake, working video playback!) Thank you to those who worked on this, particularly since I couldn't actually work out how or where to submit useful bug reports (and so resorted to my usual strategy when dealing with laptop-related issues, which is to contact mjg59 by whatever means available and follow his suggestions as precisely as possible).