They are getting annoying now I control gnome mostly with my keyboard. They just appear and do not disappear. Does anyone know how to turn them off?

control panel->desktop->panel->Miscellaneous
and
control panel->sawfish window manager->miscellaneous->tooltips

I don't have desktop and sawfish window manager in my control panel. Or we must talking about something else. I have seriously been looking for it, but I really can't find it...

tooltips in gnome are still annoying. Has anyone ever figured out where the option is to disable them?

Well, more than two years since the last post, Gnome tooltips remain a major annoyance. Has anybody found a way to disable them? (Of course I could just get rid of Gnome altogether --again-- and use a barebones approach with IceWm, but I thought I'd give Gnome another try with my current Ubuntu 8.04 installation.)

I found one person's successful solution (use gconf-editor > apps > global where there's a box to uncheck for tooltips) but it didn't work for my installation.

I'd love to get rid of these cluttering little boxes that obscure exactly what you'd *like* to be reading.

(And I hope I'm OK in posting here in the Debian forum, since Ubuntu is Debian-based....)

Figure out which package actually provides this annoyance and then purge that. Mind that it may take a whole lot of Gnome too, but that may be solved by installing the gnome-core package. Also mind that the offending package might be a (inappropriate) dependency of a package you actually want...

In fact, as I don't want a lot of garbage Gnome installs by default I stick to installing the gnome-core package instead. That still installs some annoying dependencies on its own, but much less then the standard gnome package does... (but then, I don't have flash and other "multi-media rich-internet experience" crap... )

Thanks for your very prompt reply. I will try to narrow down the source of the annoying tooltip display, but I have limited confidence I'll find it -- or a solution, for that matter -- as reading in other forums strongly hints that you'd have to recompile some stuff, including perhaps the kernel, to get rid of the tooltips. They may be born at a fairly basic level, and I'm not that skilled. I may be able just to specify "no panels" and replace them with pypanel or something equivalent that's available these days. (Haven't used pypanel in a couple of years at least.)

Thanks for the hint about gnome-core package. I'm going to copy your reply and keep it in my notes in case I can use that info one of these days.