Ubuntu 15.04 mouse problems

So, I recently install a VM using VirtualBox.  Everything seems to be working fine until I tried to navigate over the activities pane.  To my surprise, I encountered a problem where my mouse pointer disappeared.  After trying to google a solution, I tried various suggestions with regards to restarted the gdm or reinstalling packages, I had no luck.  Until I can into the following website. http://askubuntu.com/questions/126491/how-do-i-change-the-cursor-and-its-size

Here I happen to put two and two together.  So, for my case, my mouse pointer was black, and when I navigate over to the activities pane, the mouse pointer would just magically disappear.  Strange as is was, I figured, why not just change the color of my mouse pointer to something other than black.

So here is what I did.  Hit the CTRL+ALT+T keys to open the command shell.  Next, type in the following: sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme
Now, select something other than black. I chose #17, which in my case is crystal white.
Changing the value here requires a reboot - a logout and login will not suffice.  For me it worked right away.
Secondly, using dconf-editor (install using sudo apt-get install dconf-tools)
navigate to org.gnome.desktop.interface change the cursor size to 24 and cursor theme to crystalwhite

I hope this helps.

Cheers to fossfreedom who helped me figure this out.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/126491/how-do-i-change-the-cursor-and-its-size