Irrespective of Settings > Main panel > Browse mode > Row marker option, while browsing table, row is always marked when selected with the checkbox at beginning of the row.
Similarly irrespective of "Highlight pointer" option row under mouse pointer is always highlighted. However, this option affects column highlighting as expected.
"Highlight pointer" and "Row marker" are handled in common.css.php file. However, by the time the theme is processed, user preferences are not merged to the settings in config.inc.php file.
Trying to delay adding theme gives quite a number of errors. I think we should move "Highlight pointer" and "Row marker" out of the themes.
Fixed with https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/commit/a59ffb96540293eae9f102f3f024a5c3fe0e6788