When I hover my cursor (using either my mouse or my tablet pen) over the canvas the cursor disappears and i can't see what is being painted/drawn on the canvas. This is despite me still being able to paint/draw on the canvas but only able to see the effects after a few seconds.

I am experiencing this too. I think it's because the program seems to be reacting really REALLY slowly (zooming in and out takes an age for example).
Everything loads up ok and it looks fine until i open a JPEG and try to work with it. I've tried downloading Krita several times with the same effect.

Krita V2.9 works better, but is still relatively slow, but V3 is un-usable for me.

I'm using an i5 2410M, Dell Inspiron N7110 with Nvidea 550M, (all updated), 8GB Ram on Windows 7, 64bit, It's a little bit of an older machine, but it handles Corel Photopaint and Pro X just fine (Which are definitely resource hogs).

I also have an i7 4770, 16GB Windows 7, 64bit PC which makes Krita more workable, but it crashes every time i use things like the warp effects or other simpler brushes.

Can anyone answer if this is a Windows 7 thing or is there something that needs doing?

I'm having the same issue! I love animating in krita but this bug makes it impossible to draw.
This is also the only post i could find about the issue, I spent quite a while looking for it aswell.
Anyone found a fix yet? Is this only an issue for windows 7?

This is because 8f a bug in your graphics drivers.

The best thing is to update your drivers to one that has a fix.

For an ugly quick fix you can try to turn off opengl in settings->configure krita->display.

With about 100k downloads a month for Windows, it's clear that it's not generally the case that Krita is too slow, but that it is something with the individual systems of people who run into these problems.

Anyway, downloading an application again never makes any difference. If you open a jpeg, it'll be 8 bit rgba, so it isn't possible that you're accidentally using a 32 bits float/channel image under the impression that that's what one choses for a normal image. Check the memory usage in the statusbar. If that's under 4GB, that should be fine as well, on the given system.

In general, it's impossible to help people with performance issues on Windows -- I've got four test systems, 2 Win7, 2 Win10, and all four are fine. But I hardly have any other software installed on those systems, let alone 3rd party security software. So maybe check whether there's not something else running on the system that hogs the cpu, or whether you've got some weird "security" software installed. And, as said above, check whether disabling opengl makes a difference. If it does, then it's a driver issue, even if you've got the latest drivers installed.