I'm looking for opinions on when you would use balloontips in an application and if balloontips be a useful control in your design toolbox? By balloontips I mean the cartoon style balloon dialogs (with the triangular stem pointing to a specific section of the screen) used by MS Agent and by XP to provide system tray notifications.

I've been loosely tracking the UI decisions being made for Vista and Office 2007 and am under the impression that balloontips are being deprecated in favor of 'infotips', 'super infotips' (Office 2007), and notification (aka toaster) windows like the MSN Messenger window that slides out from the system tray.

In researching this topic, balloontips are starting to look old-fashioned compared to some of the new UI components coming down the line. Anyone agree or want to refute that impression?

Malcolm