Cursor disappears over document area in Office apps when using Windows 365 via Windows App (Windows 11 24H2)

Dobhal, Kanishka

If modifying the internal pointer scheme did not force the protocol to render the cursor correctly, this probably means the drop is happening entirely at the local hardware compositor level on the 10ZiG client rather than within the remote encoding stream. Windows 11 24H2 heavily relies on a feature called Multi-Plane Overlay to offload distinct visual layers, like video overlays and custom cursors, directly to the GPU. When local display drivers struggle with multi-monitor handoffs in this state, the dedicated cursor plane is frequently dropped over hardware-accelerated windows on secondary screens.

we need to completely disable Multi-Plane Overlay on your local thin clients to force the Windows Desktop Window Manager to composite all visual layers natively. You can accomplish this by navigating to the registry path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm on the local client device. You will need to create a new DWORD value named OverlayTestMode and set its value data to 5. After applying this key, a full reboot of the thin client is required to rebuild the local display stack without MPO enabled.

If the cursor still drops after disabling MPO, the next diagnostic step is to temporarily connect using the classic Remote Desktop application, previously known as MSRDC, instead of the new Windows App. Testing the older native client architecture will definitively isolate whether we are dealing with a broader WDDM driver incompatibility on the 10ZiG hardware or a specific rendering regression isolated entirely to the newer Windows App 2.x pipeline.

VP