Windows 8.1 in a VMWare Workstation 10 guest’s mouse is missing, but only sometimes

I have VMWare Workstation 10 running on a Windows 7 machine, hosting a k guest OS.

Before upgrading to WS 10 I was using version 9, and the Win8 guest OS ran without difficulty or error conditions.

Since upgrading and installing the most current VMWare Tools inside the guest after upgrading to version 10, there are circumstances where

• the mouse pointer is not visible;
• the mouse position appears stuck at a screen location which is not
  the center of the virtualized display; and
• mouse click and scrolling events still get processed.
• Once this begins happening I have to reboot the host machine to get it to stop.

(VMWare Tools 9.6.1 build-1378637 is what the WS 10 software installed)

The problem seems to correlate with whether the mouse is captured during Win 8.1's bootup process, before control is passed to the login screen. If I explicitly click the mouse into the guest OS and move it slowly around while the system is booting, then I see the mouse after clicking to lift the first screen and expose the password prompt, and there is never a problem within the guest.

If I don't do this during bootup, there is no mouse pointer, with the symptoms listed above.

I have tried removing and reinstalling VMWare tools, and the other steps published for "mouse problems" from VMWare's chaotic troubleshooting database. The problem persists.

Is there a setting in the virtual machine's configuration which could prevent this behavior?