X220T mouse pointer turned into concentric red circles?!?

[Johan]

A friend has a X220 tablet (model/type 4299-2PG), which has unfortunately been reformatted to Windows XP Professional (w/SP3 installed) due to a very unintelligent employer policy. Subsequently, the various specific ThinkPad programs and utilities (which were not part of the standard employer-XP install) have been installed, and the relevant drivers have been updated; all downloaded from Lenovo's site. So far, so good - the X220T has been running fine.

But then today... after leaving the X220T on and after being unattended for a while, when the user returned (after dinner!), the mouse pointer had suddenly turned into some three or four concentric, narrow red rings (or circles)?!? If going into Control Panel, Mouse, Pointers, the "Normal Select" mouse pointer was selected as the default Windows white arrow --> this... but still the pointer on the screen appeared as something like this except that there was no cross-hair in the center, and the circles were red. After shutting down and rebooting the laptop, everything was back to normal, fortunately. Exactly the same "phenomena" has been described by another X220T owner in the thread Lenovo X220 "Red Bullseye" surrounding mouse - unfortunately with no solution suggested other than rebooting.

Anybody can explain what this has been caused by? The tablet-functionality was "on", so perhaps if by touching ("by mistake") somewhere on the LCD can this have caused the mouse pointer to turn into the red (very annoying!) circles? There seems to be some issues with the mouse pointer/icon turning into a (filled) circle on tablets equipped (like the X220T) with Wacom digitizers; from Google'ing around I found e.g. the thread Windows 7 - Wacom Tablet, ring round pen cursor but it's not quite the thing experienced here.

Any explanations about what this peculiarity can possibly have been caused by, and how it can be disabled/avoided for the future? Thanks!

Johan