Update: See end of quetion:

A black-on-white cross-hair/I-bar mouse-pointer is soemtimes hard foe me to spot in amongst black-on-white text.

I've tried "Accessibility / Mouse Accessibility / Locate Pointer" ..
which will: Show pointer position when Control is presssed

It works (to a point), but it does have a notable problem, which renders it inpractical.

• It has the uncanny side-effect of disallowing all Control key navigation while editing a file/dir name in Nautilus (F2).. Just touching the Control key drops it out of edit mode, which means I can't keyboard paste, move-L/R word etc...

So, I'm looking for an alternative.
I've tried Compiz's Water Effect, but I need something which is sharper, faster, and localized to the pointer.

Compiz's Show Mouse (with fire) is no suitable.

I'm really lookingf for an analog of "Accessibility / Locate Pointer":
* ie. I hit Control (only).. and it blips a quick visual pulse.

UPDATE:
I've just realized why I can't find my mouse so often!
... It's because it is isn't there !!!
... Two apps I use a lot, Gedit and Konsole (KDE Terminal; it renders unicode better),
... dissolve the mouse-pointer to invisible after the first key is typed ... and Konsole does it after a few seconds of idle-time... like a video-player option: "hide the mouse".. Well I don't use the mouse much, and I thought it was juse my eyesight (which does rely a lot on Compiz's zoom)... I discovered it when I installed a "novelty" app, called Geyes from gnome-applets ("A goofy set of eyes for the GNOME panel. They follow your mouse.") ... It could follow the mouse better than me! :)