I recently need a special mouse behavior. When mouse moves, the cursor should not act as the default windows behavior. For example, when moving mouse left, the cursor actually circles clockwise. The problem is that using SetCursorPos makes the mouse cursor flicking. It's because the default cursor position is different with the new position I set. I need the default windows cursor and cannot implement an owner-draw cursor using GDI or something else for some reasons. I'm not sure if it is possible to stop the windows cursor from updating automatically.

I'm not sure if this is a possibility for you, but could you use hide the cursor (using ShowCursor(FALSE)) and then draw your own cursor in the correct spot?

How about using BOOL ClipCursor( const RECT *pRect ) ?

Yes, by setting a low-level mouse hook. Check out SetWindowsHookEx with WH_MOUSE_LL. That ought to do the trick.