why is MFC''s cursor encapsulation of whatever so bad? Am I missing something or if you want to set the cursor in a specific window you have to change the screen cursor when it enters/leaves the client area? If so how do you detect when the cursor leaves the client area? I''m trying to set the cursor to something when it''s inside a viewport - made from 2 splitter windows. Is there a better way of doing this? PS: Just another small question: how do I get a pointer to the CMainFrame class, because I need to access public member variables inside it. thanks, Frank