You could check the wiki, there might be something there. If not, you probably should work through the stuff in this thread in particular until you get it to work (or until you get stuck, then ask specific questions), and maybe put what you did, in a newbie-friendly form, in the wiki.

You're right about the issues, though I'd approach them in the reverse order; apps with cursors (like xournal, vnc, rdesktop) could be helpful to check the mouse is working initially. There's some data on changing the cursors (there is a cursor, it's just completely transparent), somewhere, but it seems you already got that? If not in one of those threads, then search around some more. I did that (though not the mouse part) in OS2007, but haven't got back to messing with such stuff since the upgrade.