How to hide mouse before it is needed, Captivate 9

I had the same issue, the solution I found was to use an invisible cursor file.

You can select a .cur file to use as your cursor. There are some "invisible" cursor .cur files that you can download online, here is an example one: http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-detail/23254

In the mouse properties click the Browse button and select the invisible cursor .cur file.

You can select a different cursor for each slide so you can make the cursor appear and dissapear from slide to slide without losing its position.

I hope this helps.

It's 2021 and it still works the same. I hate it too. It ends up covering text on my screen which looks horrible. Sorry you got such a mansplained answer:

"When you move your mouse to a position on screen and then click something, does your mouse disappear? Or does it just remain in that same spot waiting for you to do something else? Mine does the latter."

Though this may not be what you want to hear, the way the mouse works is not a 'problem' in the sense of being a bug or design flaw. Captivate works this way by design because it's simply replicating how a computer works in practice.

When you move your mouse to a position on screen and then click something, does your mouse disappear?  Or does it just remain in that same spot waiting for you to do something else?  Mine does the latter.

You can opt to remove the mouse object entirely from certain slides, and you could position some object on top of it to hide it temporarily on a slide. But when recording a software simulation set to show mouse cursor movement, Captivate normally places one of these objects on every slide. 

Mouse objects are not like captions or image objects which appear and disappear according to their placement on the timeline. Rather, what you are configuring with the mouse object on that slide is simply the duration of the mouse MOVEMENT, not the duration of the visibility of the mouse itself.