lower the time the tip shows except for taskbar, pager and clock where it makes sense to have extended times (4s in this case) re-increase the time between tip reshows because too many reshows sucks on low powered cpus and also looks a bit stupid on the pager and taskbar (among other places, i'm sure) the idea is that the tip should show only on items that the user settles on, not to follow their mouse around randomly. yes, this is not how things like tooltips work but that's because those items do something differently and do it, quite honestly, rather poorly anyways.
the design of the kicker mouse overs is quite intentional and based on a fair amount of actual research, testing and reaching stated goals.

if you think there's something wrong in it, perhaps talk to me first because it may be your assumptions that are wrong rather than the code in kickerTip.cpp.