I think hitting "h" releases the pointer too. I feel you tho fuddy, sometimes trying to figure that out in the middle of a fight is crazy.-thud
Put a +1 on your geekness atribute
Whenever I enter an arena, if it doesn't say "join requests will show in the text buffer", I just type in .join 0 and the popup box never pops up. But, the bug of no mouse pointer unless the clipboard is up appears to have not yet been squashed.
Actually it's .showjoin 0. But it would be nice if we didn't have to do that when ever changing arenas.