I found that after selecting an option from the dropdown in that cell, only the nice ToolTip displays.

I decided to use AfterCellListCloseUp to catch the first dropdown value in order to set the next cell's ToolTipText property.  This works, but I wanted it to come up sooner and have some styling, so I added a UltraToolTipManager and used the MouseEnterElement to set it to the grid.

This is causing the tooltip to display twice, with both styles.  The standard cell one and then the nicer tooltip manager one.

Unfortunately, setting it during InitializeRow doesn't help because the ToolTipText property needs to be set when a dropdown value in a cell is changed. 

Do you think setting it on cell MouseOver would work?  I can try that and have it detect the first value and set the ToolTipText property according to that.  I will post the results when done.

private void gridStudents_MouseEnterElement(object sender, Infragistics.Win.UIElementEventArgs e)
{
// Generate custom tooltip
if (e.Element.GetAncestor(typeof(CellUIElement)) != null)
{
m_tooltipInfo = new UltraToolTipInfo(((CellUIElement)e.Element.GetAncestor(typeof(CellUIElement))).Cell.ToolTipText, Infragistics.Win.ToolTipImage.None, null, Infragistics.Win.DefaultableBoolean.Default);
ultraToolTipManager1.SetUltraToolTip(gridStudents, m_tooltipInfo);
ultraToolTipManager1.ShowToolTip(gridStudents);
}
}

It was my fault and forgot to delete my post.  In case this helps someone with a similar issue, I had a filter on my data source but never executed the query (LINQ in this case) so adding ".ToList()" properly filled the dropdown.

Thank you, I'll try it out and update you.

One thing I just noticed is that the "add new" row does not display when the grid is empty (no records to load).  Should it not be displayed all the time, instead of only when the grid already has data?

That was the issue.  After rebuilding referencing libraries, it resolved itself.