I’ve had the same problem and fixed it in a different way.
Custom menu items on home page with a blank URL have the class ‘current-menu-item’ added to them (this is the bug), so the chances are your theme will style them to look as if they are selected
So, I changed the menu item link from a blank URL to ‘#’ which stopped the class ‘current-menu-item’ being added and then used the CSS below to make the cursor not a pointer.
.menu .sf-menu a[href="#"]
{
cursor:text;
}