Mouse pointer has lost its place in the shapes list

Question

Suddenly, my mouse pointer exhbits a mismatch of shape and current context.
Examples:
On the compose page of ASC, placed in the left or right margin, or anywhere from the to of the screen to the space below the grey bar of buttons that starts with the apple and ends with the search box, the pointer has the expected black arrow shape.
Hovered over Apple Support Communities, New, Your Stuff, History, Browse, or in the spaces along that line, it changes to a cross with centred dot similar to the drawn shape below:
Placed in or beside the formatting controls above the compose box, it returns to the expected black arrow shape, whether over the grey area or the cfomatting buttons.
In the text entry area, whe're back to the cross, very difficult to pick out on the page, especially when it's somewhere in the text.
The cross remains as I move the pointer down the page. There's a quick flash of the arrow to the left and slightly above the cross as the pointed moves downward across the word Categories, and across the words in the list of categories below, and from there to the bottom of the page.
The cross gets substituted for other pointer shapes as well—On Google Maps, the cross shows until I press the mouse button to grab the map, then changes to the enpected closed hand when I drag the map in any direction. In Sreet view, I get the arrowm the cross, or an I beam in the circle that indicates where a click will move the viewpoint, or a cross in the circle that indicates the center of a magnified view.
Questions: What's happening? How do I fix it?
Comments and suggestions apreciated.
Regards,
Barry
MBP with Retina, mid 2012, 2.3 GHz Core i17, 8 Gb, OS X v10.8.4 (12S55)

Answer 1

Hi Linc,
Thanks for the pointer. Neither of the Adobe plug-ins mentioned in the linked discussion are installed on my MBP; in fact the only one installed is the Google Earth We Plug-in.
In the meantime, the mouse pointer has gone back to behaving normally. The only significant action I can think of is that the MBP was shut down for a little over 10 hours today. I had restarted it a couple of times last night, but had not let it sit for any extended time.
Still a mystery.
Regards,
Barry