Busy Cursor (Spinning Wait) Hangs

This is definitely a problem I've noticed as well. I have a very fast computer with an SSD and no CPU was being used by the process giving the cursor. An empty gedit window would show the dang thing.

In fact this problem drove me so crazy, I decided to go with the "hackish" solution - get rid of the "thinking" cursor. I never needed it anyways.

The way to get rid of the "thinking" cursor without breaking anything is to simply replace it with the normal cursor image.

If you're using the default cursor theme DMZ-White, simply open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and run these commands:

cd /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursors
sudo mv watch watch.old
sudo ln -s left_ptr watch
nohup unity --replace &
exit

Restart if the problem still occurs.

Now, this doesn't technically fix the problem, but it definitely hides it out of annoyance.