Remove self._anchor Bradley Froehle recommended removing self._anchor and just requesting the anchor text for a position as it was needed. He also pointed out that Qt handles hiding the tooltip for the empty string and suppressing redraw messages which simplified the event handler code. The only problem I found is when updating my test code the tooltip takes a moment to disappear and caches the text value for a time longer than a function call. So I can't verify that the tooltip is cleared when the mouse moves off the anchor.