I had some weird behavior with a script that was actually being clobbered by a different script that had an endless looping problem as well. But I was able to pause the game (by going into the wait menu or pipboy for example). I would be curious if your tried this, and the game responded by opening the wait or pipboy menus, would your cursor come back?

Er... no, I mean, it was impossible to even start up the game in the first place. The opening credits couldn't be clicked through, because I didn't have a cursor, and even when I waited through them, no menu options would come up to let me do anything. I had to exit using Control-Alt-Delete.

Oh.. I though it was no cursor in the game, not at the launch screen. Wow! that is weird. Sorry, I've no advice for that other than what you are already doing. Did any of your backups work or were thet all fubar as well?

I decided to delete everything and start from scratch, just for the sake of keeping everything documented this time. I didn't check if the backups worked, but they probably would have.