This was beaten up several times, which actually helped me a lot.

The AX I'm using doesn't have tooltips, but provides a hook - where the parameters are the control's .left, .top, .tooltiptext, lShow. So I only have to draw the tooltip myself. Actually, the vendor shows (in C# and VB samples) that this text should go into the status bar, but that'd mean I'd have to add a status bar below the AX, which would involve even more code.

So I tried to walk a label (white opaque background, borderstyle=1, autosize) to where it should be, and make it visible when needed - and of course it went beneath the AX. Which I should have remembered... well, next I tried to build a form which would be just a wrapper around the label, but it wouldn't get small enough.

Then I searched here and - voila, there's an old message by NickN, where he uses define window ... name. Which is actually a form with all the properties set the way I need them. Very good.

Now the next problem: some of the AX's buttons are actually showing other buttons - sort of like menus or cascading toolbars. So when the user hovers the mouse over such a button, the next level toolbar shows up, but clicking any of the buttons in it doesn't work, because my tooltip form has stolen the focus.

The solution was simple: instead of showing and hiding the tooltip form, I started just switching its .left between the proper location passed as parameter and -2000. Everything works now :).

I wrote this just in case it may help someone.