Cursor Disappears in Word (Vista)

I have a 2 month old XPS M1530 with Windows Vista, has worked great!  Two days ago, while in MS Word the blinking "I" shaped cursor disappeared.  It was there in when I opened, Outlook, just not in Word.  I could still make edits by pointing with the arrow, I could even drag and highlight text, but no "I" cursor.  I thought it to be a MS Word problem in Vista. 

But last night I read online that others were having a similar problem, but in other programs (IE7, Outlook, Excel, etc.) and suggested turning off the "Hide pointer while typing" feature, which did nothing for me.  They also suggested changing the pointer scheme to other sizes and types.  This brought back the "I" cursor in Word most of the time.  However, I have noticed that I hadn't expected to see.  The cooling fan has been cycling on and off about every 90 seconds or so.  When it comes on the "I" cursor disappears for about 10 seconds until the cooling fan turns off again.  Then I'm OK for another 80 seconds.

This is such a strange anomaly that I haven't even called Dell tech support yet.

Has anyone heard of such a problem?  Is there a known fix for this annoyance?