Unfortunately since XenApp 6.5 doesn’t support 2012 we’re forced to use RDP to access those desktops instead of just publishing them as desktops. It sucks, but it is a tolerable situation – until you actually do it. The cursor performance for me by default was terrible. I felt like I was working on an X-client hosted from Germany. Typical behavior for the cursor when in an RDP session is that it moves as fluid as on your own desktop, not so with 2012. I thought maybe the solution was to upgrade to Remote Desktop Client 8 on the XenApp host since RDPing straight from my PC (across the Internet) yielded fine results. That had no useful affect. The solution ended up being a simple UI change on the client end.

“Enable pointer shadow” UNCHECK IT! Night and day, try it.

As a funny aside, if I had a 2008r2 RDP window open inside the 2012 RDP window, the behavior inside the RDP inside the RDP was normal and good. Once I “cursored” out of the RDP inside the RDP into the upper level RDP behavior got funky again, whatever.